Take the guesswork out of eggs with the appliance of a little OXO Good Grips science

I don’t know about your household, but in mine the question of how best to boil the morning eggs can be the source of many acrimonious arguments over the breakfast table. But with this gadget, that may be a thing of the past.

It seems simple, doesn’t it? You put the egg in water, time it, and then you take it out.

But do you put it in boiling water and then count the minutes?  Or put it in cold water, bring it to the boil and then count the minutes? And how many minutes?

Personally, I have always gone for the latter method.  It means there is less chance of the egg cracking as it goes from the cold fridge into boiling water. Although I am aware of course that there is a school of thought that argues eggs shouldn’t be kept in the fridge in the first place.

Then how long? I’ve always found that two minutes after the water begins to boil results in an egg I can cheerfully dip my soldiers into.

Not so cooked that the soldier buckles like a guardsman at the trooping of the colour, but not so undercooked as to be regarded as a’snotty egg’ as some of the younger house members refer to it.

Enter OXO and the OXO Good Grips Digital Egg Timer with Piercer. This clever device, rather wittily presented to look like an egg, is designed to take the guesswork out of egg timing.First one decides what size egg one has and sets that using a slider switch on the device.

It’s not always easy to gauge egg size though, as different producers seem to have different measuring standards, and then they confuse things even further by ensuring the eggs in the box are all different sizes anyway.

We decided that as Large was what the box said, that’s what we would set, although if these were large eggs I’d be interested to see what they called small.

You then set your desired doneness using a pictogram, I set what I thought would be runny but not too runny, there is room for fine tuning on the 7 settings, and then moved to the fun part.

As Granny always advised; if you prick your eggs they won’t break as the expanding air can easily escape. It’s not easy pricking an egg though, so this device has a concealed needle to help. You set your egg on the yellow bit, push down gently and the needle pierces cleanly and easily.

With the water boiling we slipped in the egg and pressed start. A blue light began progressing and we waited for the alarm to go.

And waited. And waited. The problem with the boiling water method is that you’ve already hung around for 5 minutes for the water to come to the boil and now you’re looking at another 6 -8 minutes wait on top of that. All the time that the water was coming to the boil it could have been cooking the egg. And saving the planet by using less energy.

Anyway, the little blue lights advanced, while I fended off increasing complaints of’where’s my egg?’, and eventually the buzzer went.Cracking it open it was slightly overdone for my taste, but lesson learned I’ll set it differently next time.

It is an act of folly to ever try and time an egg with a watch or kitchen clock, you will forget to take the egg out, so a timer is a must have.

This amusing device combines timer and egg piercer in a jolly little package that takes much of the guesswork out and amuses children. The spike locks away when not being used, so it is safe to leave the device out.

Available at Amazon. RRP £20. Batteries included.