Kitchen gadgets review: the Egg Master – a horrifying, unholy affair

Kitchen gadgets review: the Egg Master – a horrifying, unholy affair 1
Gadgets

I can’t look at the hot, sweating mess that emerges from the Egg Master’s opening, let alone eat it
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Like an alien looking for a host … Rhik Samadder testing the Egg Master.

What?
The Egg Master (£29.99, DecentGadget, Amazon) is a vertical grill encased in silicone housing. Ingredients poured into the plastic tube are heated by an embedded, wraparound element. When ready, food spontaneously rises from the device.

The Egg Master has to be observed in all its slow-mo action to be truly appreciated. Video by Rhik Samadder.
Well?
This week’s gadget describes itself as “a new way to prepare eggs,” which is accurate in the way that chopping off your legs could be described as a new way to lose weight. Let’s start with that name, and it’s the unsettling taint of S&M, an overtone consistent with the design. In hot pink and stippled black rubber, Egg Master’s exterior screams cut-price, mail-order adult toy; its funneled hole suggests terrible uses. And it has a traffic light on it, for some reason.

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“Spray non-stick agent into the container,” the box advises, which gets the tummy rumbling. As instructed, I crack two whole eggs into the hot tunnel, trying to ignore the gurgling sound from within. It’s impossible to see what’s going on – but it doesn’t smell good. I squint into the dark opening. A bulging yellow sac peers back at me. Minutes pass; the smell does not. Then, without warning, a flaccid, spongy log half jumps from the machine, writhing like an alien parasite in search of a host body. It’s horrifying, like a scene from The Lair of the White Worm.

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I can’t look at it, let alone eat it. To stall, I consult the badly photocopied handbook, which suggests other delicious treats this baby is good for. Egg Master Egg Crackers are mixed-up crackers, egg and cheese; Egg Master Egg Dog; PB&J (peanut butter and jelly) Egg Master, and the tantalizing Cuban Egg Master. It’s a dossier of culinary hate crimes (barbecue Pork Egg Master has two ingredients, “biscuit dough and three teaspoons of precooked pork”). Nervously, I try the sulphuric, sweating egg mess before me. The taste is … not the best. As I dry heave into the sink, I try to remember if I read about this machine in the Book of Revelation. Why is it in the world? Who created it? Maybe no one. Perhaps soon, sooner than you think, we will all bow to the Egg Master.

I try to remember if I read about this machine in the Book of Revelation. Why is it in the world? Who created it? …
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I try to remember if I read about this machine in the Book of Revelation. Why is it in the world? Who created it?
Redeeming features?
It’s quite space-efficient, being so dense with evil. The box contains free wooden skewers to defend yourself from your food and a pipe cleaner to swab the device, although no holy water to soak it in.

Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
Under the floorboards. 5/5. Just kidding. 0/5.

What?
The Mix & Mist salad sprayer (£16, amazon.co.uk) is a double-nozzle pump fed by a bi-compartmental chamber. Synthesizes oil and vinegar under pressure into the mist.

Why?
Dress for the salad you want, not the salad you have.

Well?
I’m trying to think fairly about the aspirational product before me, but the box is making it hard. For a start, it has the words “clean eating” printed right on the front, which annoys me irrationally, much like talking to someone sitting on a medicine ball. “Eating clean is not about cutting calories; it’s about cutting out processed food,” the box reads. “Preparing real food, with wholesome, unadulterated ingredients, from scratch.” So … cooking. You’re talking about cooking.

There are other confusing aspects to the Mix & Mist from Taylor’s Eye Witness. Taylor’s Eye Witness is a strange name for a cookware company – calling to mind a violent crime in a menswear department – but it has been around since “the early part of the 19th century”. Sounds a bit vague. “Control the mix on the fly at the twist of the wrist” doesn’t sound very 19th century. (Frankly, it sounds like something I would write.)

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It’s a good idea, though, having chambers for olive oil and balsamic vinegar that let you mist a bespoke combo, and the design does have elegance. There are settings for either oil or vinegar, half and half, and any ratio you like, which is selected by turning the gauge on the device’s neck. When would you use the vinegar-only setting? “Homemade chips,” according to the blurb. (Anyone administering a mist of balsamic vinegar to homemade chips is asking for a punch in the corduroys.)

Sadly, in practice, the Mix & Mist serves up nothing but problems. It categorically produces a squirt rather than mist. Initially, I couldn’t work up enough pressure in the 50/50 setting and ended up getting all oil and no vinegar. I had to work the pump maniacally even to get to that point as if I were wielding a Super Soaker 0.0001 or spraying the kitchen for greenfly. When I turned the device upright to give the pumps some depth of liquid to draw from, I jetted grease over my keyboard, walls, and ceiling. It has been a week since I removed this uselessness from my kitchen mix. Gone – and not mist.

Redeeming features?
All the settings work equally well, which is not at all.

Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
Both chambers can do one. 2/5