Review: The Perfect Egg
Score:
30%
Now, don't laugh. For the attention-distracted and culinary-challenged among us, boiling an egg isn't trivial. It's just far to easy to get distracted and go off reading tweets or stress over something else in the kitchen and before you know it, your boiled egg is... well, a hard boiled egg. 'The Perfect Egg' is, in theory, a cut above the usual egg timer applications, aiming to offer a modicum of advice and a dash of glitz to proceedings. However, it's ultimately as flawed as the vagaries of 'kitchen science' itself.
Version Reviewed: 2.1.0
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There's nothing like applying science and technology to a real world task, in order to make it better and more consistent. What could be simpler than boiling an egg?
Actually, quite a lot. You see, a lot depends on the size of the egg, the temperature it has been stored at, the altitude you live at (no, really) and your preference for how you like the yolk to look (liquid/soft/hard). That's a lot of variables to juggle in your head when wondering how long to give the eggs in the saucepan - which is why the Pico Brothers have stepped in with The Perfect Egg.
The presentation here is nigh-on perfect, with a graphical selector for yolk type and then sliders to adjust the parameters for your eggs. You then follow the on-screen instructions and (if you want) watch the progress bar creep across the screen. What could go wrong?
Actually, two things. One minor, one huge.
Firstly, the instructions refer to 'rapid boil', presumably thinking of a gas hob. On my electric hob, it takes a good four minutes to boil water, horribly skewing the eventual results. So I compromised and stuck the egg in when the water was hot but not boiling, and, as you can see from the photo at the bottom, it turned out OK in the end. But it would surely have been better for 'The Perfect Egg' to have worked around 'insert eggs into boiling water' and done the calculations from there?
Secondly, and unforgiveably, there's no audible alarm. At least, I heard a very quiet buzzer noise once and not a peep from it since, despite trying the application five times. The one thing an egg timer application has to do - if nothing else - is sound the alarm once the time is up! The kitchen can be a noisy and distracting place (or maybe that's just my house) and an alarm has got to be audible and obvious.
Maybe, I thought, the alarm's not sounding because 'The Perfect Egg' isn't in the foreground on my phone? After all, I'd been checking Twitter while the egg cooked. So I tried again, keeping the application on-screen. Still no alarm.
It's a crying shame and surely has to be a bug of some kind. If fixed, I'd score 'The Perfect Egg' at 70% or more, because of its intelligence and presentation. As a commercial app (even at just £1 or so) it has the right production values. It just.... doesn't work yet.
Steve, AAS, 4 March 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at