Monday, January 7, 2008
egg volumes
You know when recipes indicate a specific size of egg? They’re not just trying to mess with you. In fact, 1 cup of eggs can be made with 4 jumbo, 4 to 5 extra-large, 5 large, 5 to 6 medium or 7 small eggs, so it is good not to use the sizes interchangeably. The good news is that large eggs are fairly standard in U.S. recipes, thus your best bet if you only want to buy one size.
But have you noticed that Ina Garten always uses extra-large eggs? Still, I use large eggs in her recipes and they always turn out fine…
Yes, and it totally irks me. If it uses enough–depending on the difference between the volume needed and the volume large eggs would yield–I’ll add one. In fact, if I ever get to blogging about her lemon bars, I realized afterward that mine would have set better had I added another (it uses many eggs). This may not be noticeable in a recipe with 3 or less, or in a cake, which can be more forgiving.
That is one of the reasons I love teh Cake Bible–she breaks all of the ingredients down to ouces and grams as well.
I halve a lot of recipes when I’m baking because there are only two of us. For this reason I’ve really loved being able to buy cartons of ungraded, randomly-sized eggs from local people who have a few chickens in the backyard. When I halve a recipe calling for 1 large egg, I can just use 1 small egg instead of worrying about halving an egg. That said, I am pretty casual with my baking measurements in general and figure a little extra egg in a recipe won’t usually matter much!
I read once that large and extra-large eggs are essentially interchangeable until you need more than four. To simplify my life, that’s the rule I bake by.
many recipes call only egg yokes, so i collect the whites in my freezer. with these whites i have collect over time, a make angle food cakes. i have always had to eyeball the amount as to what i think one egg white would measure out to be. it would be nice to know what one egg white measure out to or weights in grams or ounce.