Poached to perfection

Poached eggs can make for a tasty dish, but they don't always have the most uniform appearance. If you want to bring a little more perfection to your poached eggs, the Individual Egg Poacher is the solution. The egg poacher is a steel cup that hangs over the side of a pan. You fill the pan with water as you normally would to poach eggs, but you crack the egg into the Individual Egg Poacher. It's perforated so that water can circulate through it, but it keeps the eggs contained for a neater appearance. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the Individual Egg Poacher is metal, so pulling it out of hot water will require a mitt or some other protection.

The Individual Egg Poacher is easy to clean; it has a nonstick silver finish. It measures 3 1/2 inches by 2 1/2 inches by 4 1/4 inches, making it ideal for even the largest chicken eggs. If you find a store that sells goose eggs, it's even big enough to allow you to experiment with poaching those. The Individual Egg Poacher is $3.95, making picking up a couple so that you can poach multiple eggs at once very practical.