Eggs. Incredible packets of information. Also, delicious. Kitchen lore says that the pleats in a chef's toque, which are 101 to be precise, are emblematical and represent the number of ways to cook an egg!

Cake recipes often call for room-temperature eggs, which are incorporated into the batter more readily than cold eggs. I wonder, though, if the difference between room temperature and cold eggs was so great that I could actually ruin a cake recipe.

To find out, I conducted a blind tasting of two yellow cakes, one made with room-temperature eggs and the other with eggs pulled straight from the refrigerator. The cake prepared with cold eggs, produced a slightly thicker batter and took five minutes longer to bake. The cake made with room-temperature eggs had a slightly finer, more even crumb, but the cold egg cake was entirely acceptable. Overall, I strained to detect differences between the two, so I think it's fine to use cold eggs for most basic cake recipes if you'd like.

However, cold eggs can cause problems in finicky cakes, like Angel Food or Chiffon, that really rely on air incorporated into the beaten eggs as a primary means of leavening. In these cases, I found the cold eggs didn't really whip nearly as well as room temperature eggs and that the cakes didn't rise properly. As a result, these cakes were too dense when made with cold eggs. If you need to warm eggs quickly, place them in a bowl, cover them with hot but not boiling water, and then let them sit for five minutes.

Older eggs are better for baking than fresh eggs.

Don't pass up farm-fresh eggs in hopes of baking a better cake; age doesn't matter.

Because egg whites thin with age, some bakers theorized that the weak proteins of eggs, even a few weeks old, can stretch more than those from just laid eggs, leading to cakes that rise higher and have a softer, more tender texture than cakes made with freshest eggs. To test this, I made a yellow layer cake with seven-week-old supermarket eggs, which is easy to tell because the date is on the carton, and some fresh farm eggs from the Napa farmers market that had been laid only a couple of days before.

Any differences were really slight. The cake made with the older eggs dissolve a little more quickly on the tongue, but the cake made with farm-fresh eggs was a little more attractive. Only a few tastes in could I actually detect any variations and texture, and one cake rose higher than the other. Grab fresh eggs if you can, but think about scrambling or frying any you don't use for baking since those are dishes where freshness truly matters

The Intentional Table is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Did you know you can tell how fresh an egg is by putting it in a bowl of water? If it floats, it's bad.

Older eggs do float, but that doesn't tell you anything about their quality.

You may have heard this common advice for testing the freshness of eggs without cracking them open. You put the egg in a bowl of cold tap water. If it lies flat on the bottom, it's fresh. If it stands up and sort of bobs around on the bottom, it's not as fresh but still safe to eat, and if it's close to the surface, floating, that's a no.

I decided to test this out with three eggs that had sequential expiration dates about a month apart. You may be wondering how I did this, but I'm not a really accurate scientist, so I just wrote on them with a Sharpie. The results matched the description of the egg's behavior based on their age; the fresh egg sank, the next fresh egg bobbed, and the ones that were the oldest just went right to the top. They floated.

Eggs take in air as they age, creating an air cell or bubble inside the egg. If it floats, it has a good-sized air cell, which indicates that the egg is at least a month or two old and is not safe to eat. Based on other tests I've done on the shelf life of eggs. I do know that an older egg is not necessarily a spoiled egg. I found a few performance differences in fresh eggs and eggs that were about three months old. If it smells odd or displays discoloration, it is definitely time to send that there egg to the compost.

Provisions for Your Intentional Table from Musette!

Thanks for Reading!

Share The Intentional Table