This Gadget Lets You Scramble Eggs Inside Their Shell

A golden egg is an egg that has, in one way or another, been scrambled inside its shell and then boiled. What comes out, when the shell is peeled away, is a beautiful all-yellow orb, the yolk having blended with the white. There are a lot of ways to make a golden egg, and most of them are complex, labor-intensive and pretty awkward. One technique calls for you, the golden egg maker, to insert an egg into the sleeve of a T-shirt and secure the egg on both sides with twine or rubber bands. The egg is then spun with both hands a dozen or so times, back and forth, which mixes up its contents. (The same method can also be applied to stockings.) Another strategy involves an odd tool called the Golden Goose Egg Scrambler, which claims to operate as a kind of centrifuge, spinning the egg’s contents into a scramble. But it mostly looks like a futuristic resistance band.

So much work, it seems, for such a small reward. But there’s a new gadget called Orbi that may have cracked the golden egg conundrum. It isn’t publicly available yet, so I cannot now vouch for its efficacy in the golden egg department, but it certainly looks promising because it’s almost entirely a hands-free device. (The Orbi is currently raising money in a seed round on Kickstarter, which ends in 21 days. As of this writing, it’s raked in $8,382 of a desires $5,000, and it will be delivered in April; it costs about $50 to back.)

The way the Orbi produces a golden egg is simple, at least according to its Kickstarter page. “It works by quickly rotating an egg back and forth,” the page says. “This mixes the egg white and yolk inside the eggshell without introducing outside air.” You put the egg in the Orbi, which is motor-powered and looks kind of like a satellite or something vaguely space-related, lock the device, and in 20 seconds, the Kickstarter page avers, “you have a perfectly scrambled egg.”

This machine could disrupt the egg-making game forever. At the moment, it’s hard to imagine that line cooks want to be seen tossing eggs around in fabric, like a bunch of amateurs. If the Orbi produces, we might start seeing more golden eggs at more restaurants. Friends might start offering golden eggs as a kind of no-hassle appetizer at parties, in lieu of the deviled egg, perhaps. And toast would have a regular new partner. But if the Orbi doesn’t deliver, it’s back to the stockings.