What's the Best Way to Crack an Egg?

What’s the culinary task you’ve repeated more than anything else?

Depending on what you you like to cook, it may be dicing an onion, or perhaps squeezing a lemon. Maybe it’s breaking down a chicken or bringing dough together.

Personally, I’ve tested and written more about eggs than any subject I can think of and as a consequence, cracking an egg is probably the task I’ve repeated more than any other in the kitchen.

Through my years of restaurant work, my go-to method is the one-handed approach. I pick up an egg in my right hand, rap it against he counter, then use my thumb and forefinger to grip one half of the shell and my ringer finger and pinky to grab the other half and prise them apart. This method works well if you’ve got dozens and dozens of eggs to crack your way through, because it frees up your left hand to grab the next egg and pass it to your right hand as soon as it’s empty, significantly speeding up the process.

Using this method, you’ll typically wind up with at least a few broken yolks and some stray bits of egg shell here and there. This is fine if you are planning on picking those bits of shell out or pushing the eggs through a fine mesh strainer before scrambling them or pouring them into your quiche batter. 

But if your goal is to keep your eggs perfectly intact for frying or poaching–that is, no broken yolks, no stray bits of shell to pick out later–it’s better to use a two-handed approach, cracking the egg first, then using both of your thumbs to prise apart the shell more gently.

Even within the two-handed realm, there’s debate over how to best make the initial crack.

I decided to perform a little egg-speriment to figure out which method actually is best.

Let’s crack on.

The Three Egg-Cracking Methods

There are three basic methods to crack an egg.*

• Against a flat surface

• Against the edge of a bowl

• Some egg-on-egg action

So which one is best?

*As soon as I make a statement like this, I know that at least one reader is going to jump into the comments suggesting an esoteric egg cracking method passed down by their mother, or perhaps some egg-cracking tool designed by a grad student while procrastinating on their dissertation. I am interested in all these things, but I will not let them interfere with my current testing.

On an episode of American Masters at Home, Jacques Pépin suggests that a flat surface is the superior method. This is the method I’ve always used as well. My thought is that the sharper edge of the rim of a bowl is more likely to accidentally puncture the yolk. From a food safety perspective, Mr. Pépin also suggests that cracking using the edge of a bowl is more likely to allow the egg whites and yolk come in contact with the outside of the shell, where harmful bacteria may reside (the interior of an egg laid by a healthy chicken should be sterile).

In order to figure test this out, I cracked a half dozen eggs using each method, noting how many broken yolks I ended up with, and the difficulty I had.

To my surprise, not only did cracking on a flat surface turn out to be more difficult–a flat crack is harder to get your thumbs into for prising–it also produced the most broken yolks, with two out of six of them breaking while cracking. The bowl-edge method created clean cracks that were easy to pry at, and because separating the shell halves was easier, the yolks and whites came out perfectly intact.

Similarly, rapping two eggs against each other created a crack that was much easier to separate then rapping the egg against a flat surface. (Cracking egg-to-egg also transforms your egg cracking into a fun game as you can place bets on which egg will be the last to crack).

These results surprised me so much that I repeated the test, cracking another 18 eggs with each method for a total of two dozen eggs each. The results were the same, of the eggs I cracked against a flat surface, 4 out of 24 came out with broken yolks and difficult-to-separate shells. Of the eggs cracked against each other, only 1 came out with a broken yolk. And of the eggs I cracked against the edge of a bowl or pan, all 24 came out fully intact.

Not only that, but cracking against a flat surface is also more likely to leave strands or puddles of loose egg whites behind on the cutting board or surface of the stove as you lift the egg to separate the shell halves. Cracking against the side of the bowl or pan, or above the bowl or pan against another egg means that any bits of stray white are right there with the rest of the egg, rather than on your cutting board or counter.

What about Safety? 

So what about the safety issue?

While it’s true that in eggs that are plucked fresh-from-the-cloaca, bacteria (including salmonella) can deposit itself on the exterior of the shell, the risk is minimal when you are buying your eggs from the supermarket, where the eggs have all been washed and sanitized before packaging. Especially if you are planning on fully cooking the eggs before consumption.

Turned out that even after two and a half decades of repeating a task, and despite my confidence that the method I’d been using was the right one, there was still something new for me to learn.  Cracking against a flat surface was the inferior method in all respects.

I guess the (perfectly intact, easily separate) yolk is on me.