This Gadget Helps You Peel a Dozen Eggs in Five Minutes
Egg-peeling is, more often than not, a frustrating process. Just yesterday morning, for instance, I was peeling an egg over my kitchen trash can, discarding the shell bit by bit, when the egg slipped out of my fingers and fell into the garbage bin. Egads! I considered fishing it out but figured that was below me (maybe). That sad moment probably wouldn’t have come to pass had I had the Negg, a new tool whose awkward name belies its apparent usefulness. The Negg, a decked out plastic container that lays waste to hardboiled egg shells, claims it can help you peel a dozen boiled eggs in under four minutes.
How does it work? Well, rather than tapping the egg on a counter and then working the peel off in a painstaking fashion, as I usually do, you open up the Negg, toss in an egg, pour in a little water (about a quarter of a cup, the Negg’s website advises), cover it up, and shake until the white of the egg becomes visible. Then you pop off the cap, pour out the egg, and voilà—you have a perfectly peeled egg.
No less a food authority than Florence Fabricant recommended the Negg in a recent squib in The New York Times. “This clever plastic egg peeler really works,” Fabricant writes admiringly of the Negg, which found funding through a Kickstarter campaign and was invented by Bonnie Tyler (who watched videos of commercial egg peelers and was inspired to create a hand-help option, according to the Negg’s press materials) and Sheila Torgan of Fairfield, Connecticut.
Why it’s called the Negg is unclear. Presumably, it isn’t reference to "the neg," a technique used by pick-up artists in which they insult the object of their desire. Most likely it has something to do with no + egg. But you never know. Fabricant points out, usefully, that a “jelly jar with some water” works “almost as effectively” as the Negg. That’s something Extra Crispy has known for a while.
