Back to Basics TEM500 2-Slice Toaster

My wife and I got this great appliance for Christmas from some friends of ours. I never knew such a thing existed! My wife hates eggs, but I love bagel/egg/bacon sandwiches. I stopped making them on a regular basis because it was too time consuming to thaw a bagel, make the bacon, heat up the frying pan, fry the egg, try and make sure all 3 things were done at once, wash the cheese covered spatula, wait for the frying pan to cool off and then wash it etc.. With the Egg & Muffin maker it solves all those problems.

Basically, as you can see from the picture, it's a toaster than has an egg poacher on the front, and that consists of the following parts:

(from the bottom up)

Heating Tray - This is where you deposit the water that will steam or "poach" the egg.

Steamer Tray - This holds the poaching tray or also holds up to 4 raw eggs if you want hard cooked (I haven't tried them yet but I plan on it tomorrow!)

Poaching Tray - This is where you deposit the raw egg or scrambled egg mixture (Yup you can make a scrambled egg too. Haven't tried that yet though.)

Warming Tray - This is where you can put any pre-cooked meat like bacon, sauasage, ham etc.. and the steam will keep it warm (but unfortunately soggy. More on that below).

Lid - The lid covers everything and has a vent to allow steam to escape.

The process is very simple. There are 3 different uses.

1) Toast Only - If you just want to use this as a toaster, simply press the TOAST button, and press down on the lever as you would on any toaster. Done.

2) Egg & Toast - Of course you can make toast, a bagel, an english muffin etc.. but if you want to make an egg swich, you press this button.

3) Egg Only - If you just want an egg, press this button only.

Lets focus on making just an egg sandwich. Here are the steps:

1) Pre-cook any meat you'd like in the sandwich.

2) The appliance comes with a measuring cup. Either fill water up to the soft or medium line on the poaching side of the cup (it's labled) depending on how done you want the egg, and pour it into the heating tray. You can also just measure out 2 - 2 1/2 tablespoons of water, although as I'll explain below, this wasn't enough.

3) Put the steamer tray on top of the heating tray.

4) Spray the poaching tray with cooking spray LIGHTLY (I'll explain below) and crack an egg and put it in the tray. Break the yolk with a fork. You can also make scrambled egg mixture and put it in as well. Place the poaching tray on top of the steamer tray.

5) Place the warming tray on top of the poaching tray and put any pre-cooked meat in it.

6) Put the lid on top of the warming tray.

7) Press the EGG/TOAST button. Set the toaster light/dark lever and press down on the toaster lever.

Now, in this mode, the toaster tries to make the toast (or bagel or whatever) and the egg finish at the same time, so the egg will start first (and the word EGG will light up and the word TOAST will start blinking), then about 30 seconds later the toast will start (and the word TOAST will light solid). When the toast is done, the word TOAST will no longer be lighted, so you know it's done. However, the toast will not pop up. When the egg is done, the word EGG will no longer be lighted and THEN the toast will pop up. This is how you know everything is done.

I'll admit that my first try with this appliance didn't go that well. After about a minute and a half the bagel I was making with the sandwich popped up, and while it was toasted, the egg wasn't even close to being done. So I put the toaster on EGG mode only, put more water in the heating tray and tried again but it kept shutting off after only a minute. I had to try a second time to cook the egg only before it finally cooked fully. Unfortunately it was really greasy, so I threw it out and decided I must've done something wrong, and tried again.

I then realized I made the following mistakes:

1) I put too much cooking spray on the poaching tray. The kind we had was more like liquid butter spray and made a pool of it. I figured this was ok. Nope. This is the reason why the egg came out greasy the first time.

2) When I put the water in the heating tray, I measured 2 1/2 tablespoons, using a regular soup tablespoon, as the manual says, instead of using the measuring cup. This is not enough water and I suspect that's why the machine kept shutting off prematurely.

I finally fixed the problems by first spraying the poaching tray and wiping off any excess with a paper towel so it was slick, but I couldn't actually see any cooking spray. Then I measured out water in the measuring cup (up the medium line on the poaching side) and it was alot more water than the 2 1/2 tablespoons the manual says you can use.

This time everything came out near perfect. The egg finished about 2 minutes after the bagel, and the bagel was still warm. All I had to do was drain a tiny bit of water off the egg, and put cheese on the egg and then microwave it for 30 seconds so the cheese would melt. I say "near" perfect because I put some bacon in the warming tray that was originally crispy, but the steam wound up making it soggy. It was still very good, but next time I will probably just make the bacon as I'm making the egg, because it will be done in the same amount of time (about 4 minutes). The end result was a very tasty sandwich in much less time than it used to take. It was a bit strange eating a poached egg instead of a fried egg, but I got over it quickly :)

Clean up is a snap. Simply wipe down the heating tray after each use with a wet paper towel and wash the other trays (except the lid which I just wiped down with a wet paper towel because it only had steam on it), and that's it!

I definately recommend this product. The only other negative comment I can give is that obviously you can only make one at a time. While I'm the only one who eats breakfast sandwiches, and my wife and I never make more than 2 pieces of toast/bagels at one time, it's never an issue. We had a 4 slot toaster than we're replacing with this because it toasts just as well, and we never used more than 2 slots at once.