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| EGGSTRACTOR "It peels your eggs for you!" |
I don't consider myself either a lover or hater of gadgets -- I am mildly interested, but would not go out of my way to acquire supposedly helpful household inventions. The other day my husband mentioned something called the Eggstractor, a gadget which he found fascinating because it forces air into the empty space at the base of an egg to pop a hard-boiled egg right out of its shell. Out of curiosity, I decided to learn more about the Eggstractor. The first bit of information I found was an article on the Huffington Post website entitled "The Eggstractor Cannot Possibly Work, As Confirmed by Amazon Reviews (VIDEO)". Oh dear, not good! I read the article, which basically declared any and all egg separators to be useless and dumb ideas, despite the claims of the typically overenthusiastic informercial video included in the review.
Thinking that perhaps the author of this piece had some sort of bias against gadgets, I went to the Amazon website to read the Eggstractor reviews. With a 1.8 out of five stars rating from 44 customers, the Eggstractor continued to lose credibility. Almost all of the reviews were negative, and some were positively hilarious, with the general consensus being that the Eggstractor should be renamed the Eggsploder! It seems that very few eggs escape this implement unscathed, with most either losing the yolk but retaining the shell on the white, or just ending up splitting into an unappetizing mess of egg fragments still stuck to bits of shell. Herculean strength also seemed to be a prerequisite, as less muscular users complained that the bellows portion of the device was impossible to compress.
I was thoroughly intrigued now, and had to check out some YouTube videos of the Eggstractor put to use by the average person. The first video I watched, called "Re: Eggstractor for the rest of us", just cracked me up (pun intended). A very ordinary woman matter-of-factly explains the woes she faces in her attempts to use the Eggstractor. She pushes and pushes and pushes on the bellows, to no avail, as the egg stubbornly remains unpeeled on the stand. Finally, after the sixth try, out pops the yolk, the white remaining behind in the completely undamaged shell!
The fellow in the second video I viewed had much better luck. Despite the fact that he was a bit disorganized, and distracted by a parrot in the kitchen as well as a very loud television set in the background, he managed to get the eggs properly boiled (only breaking one in the process) and ready to be extracted. On a rather small and slippery countertop, this man managed to extract all but one of the undamaged eggs. He got a bit overconfident at one point and did mangle one egg, but the rest were perfect, with just a tiny bit of shell left adhering to the bottoms which was easily removed.
After watching several more Eggstractor videos, I came to two conclusions:
1) If you are a young healthy male you will have few problems using the Eggstractor; everyone else will usually either be unable to properly push the bellows or end up creating an unusable egg mess.
2) Buy this gadget if you want to have a bit of fun and don't mind wasting a lot of eggs, but don't expect it to make peeling hard-boiled eggs easier for you.
Easter will be here in less than two weeks, and that means lots of hard-boiled eggs. If you and your family are not really fond of eggs and are looking for entertainment, by all means get yourself an Eggstractor. However, I really don't think there is an Eggstractor coming into my life anytime soon. I've learned that if you boil fresh eggs they will be hard to peel, but older eggs are easily peeled after boiling, so I will just continue to boil older eggs and peel them manually.
On the other hand, there is a nifty little gadget called the Dreamland Egg Mold that somehow creates amazingly shaped yolks within the whites of hard-cooked eggs that you then cut into decorative slices.
I may just have to get myself one of these contraptions. After all, how hard could it possibly be to use?
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