Poach Pod: Eggstrodinairy?

I love poached eggs. I could find ways to eat them with every meal...if I could cook them. I've ruined a lot perfectly good eggs in my time trying to poach them. What's more, poaching more than one egg at once is even further beyond my skill.

Enter the Poach Pod. With this, one can supposedly cook perfect poached eggs any time. This classy invention falls under the category of gift. At about 10 dollars for the set, I have passed it up in the past (ironically, probably wasting more than 10 dollars worth of eggs in the process). Be that as it may, my mom thought it was cool, so she surprised me with a set of them.

Theoretically, with these two silicone cups I can poach eggs with ease and leave all of my egg failures in the past.

Initial Thoughts


I like how these things look. They're modern and fun looking. They're dishwasher safe, and I can apparently bake with them if i so choose. Since I've been wanting them for a while, I guess they've done their job in selling themselves.

The instructions seem easy enough. Pretty much boil water an add the cups with eggs in them. I can do that, right?

Poaching

The cooking process starts off simple enough. I put some water on the stove to boil and get the prep work done. The directions tell me to oil the poachers, so I spray a liberal amount of PAM on each cup.

Getting the eggs in the cups was trickier than I thought it would be, but I think it's only because of my personal egg habit. I normally break the eggshell on the side of my frying pan. In this situation, I was pretty far away from my pot of water, and couldn't do that. I also didn't want to get any egg in the water by messing up the crack. I tried whacking the eggs with a knife to break them like I've seen people do. As you can see, I had one success and one failure. The yoke on the left was DOA due to some jagged edges made by my failure to use the knife properly. I figured it would cook anyhow and left it.

Also, the cups are not very stable when putting the eggs in. I did the first one too fast and almost spilled egg all over my counter.

In any case, they were ready to be cooked.




Into the water the eggs went. They looked like lily pads! I put the lid on and cooked them for 4 minutes as specified by the directions. On removing the lid...something had gone wrong. The cups had water in them and there was egg all around the pan, quite like my other failed attempts at poaching. The egg with the intact yolk had submerged itself. It looked like an exceptional poached egg though. The other egg didn't look good at all.

I had fun trying to tip the cups in the pot to get all the water out, while not spilling the egg. Anyhow...

The broken yolk egg was still super runny on the inside for some reason, so I cooked it for a little while longer. The picture above is the "after cooking the hell out of it" picture. It still looked gross. Apparently I still waste an egg with these. I'm pretty sure if I used them again, I wouldn't have a fail egg. I generally don't break yolks.

Result: 1 Perfectly Poached Egg!
Well I'm getting hungry all over again looking at this picture. The egg was perfectly cooked. I would have liked two...but these things happen.

Critiques

1. Shape of the cups: The cups are unstable when putting the eggs in and the three handles make it hard to pick up without tipping. Also, I can't figure out what the holes are for in the cup. Maybe one can tie to top together?
   
2. Type of Pot: I think next time I'll use a deeper pot or a convex lid. The lid may have pushed them down. It's also possible that I was doing too hard of a boil, and that's why it happened.
3. Taste: The egg tastes a little like the silicone cup.
   
4. Cracked yolk=fail?

All in all, if I hadn't messed up the egg and perhaps used the wrong pot, I would have had 2 passable poached eggs. Purists will say I cheated and the shape of the egg isn't correct (it's supposed to look like an organic shape, not a jello mold). I think the biggest benefit is that it is super easy to poach more than one egg at a time.

Final Review
Nifty, but not strictly necessary. Great if a lot of eggs need to be poached at once.