Ugh, yuck!  No thank you!

But, sometimes it’s hard to avoid.  No matter how carefully you try to crack that egg you somehow, inevitably, end up with some fragments of shell in your beautiful sunny-side up egg.  Or your silky pudding.  Or what was supposed to be your silky pudding.

Is there a way to evade it?

Oh yes there is!  At least, you can cut back on the crunch of those unwanted pieces of shell, significantly, if you just stick with this method of crackin’ yo eggs!

Step #1:  Crack your egg on a stationary, hard surface.

Like your kitchen counter!

Nothing more stationary than that…probably not much movement there.  And unless your counter is made out of cork (and even then…), I’m fairly certain that it has a hard surface of some sort.

See the perfect 1st crack of the shell?  It’s starting to break into a clean line…

and the 2nd whack against the countertop produces this clean seam around the equator of the egg,

and Ta Da!  Two perfect halves.  No fragments.

No loose bits.

They could almost be glued back together perfectly!

Step #2:  Oh yeah.  There’s only 1 step!  How simple is that? 

Here’s the noticeable difference if you try cracking your egg against the side of a bowl…

Can you just see the bowl wobbling as you try to hit the egg against it?  So you’d have to use your other hand to steady it, but still…

here it starts…not a clean cut and shards swimming in the white…

and the integrity of the yolk is also always at a higher risk because the edges of the eggshell are fragmented.  Here you see the debris (Good luck getting all those little pieces of shell out of that egg white, right?!) and the cracked yolk.

Such a great little kitchen tip that took me all my life to learn!

So, hopefully I’m catching you as a newer cook and can say…

Welcome to the world of consistently silky puddings!