I eat a lot of eggs and I swear, it’s hard to break them into a pan without there being bits of shell that fall in too.
Maybe my technique is getting rusty but I suspect egg shells are getting either thinner or more brittle.
Has anyone else noticed this?
I’ve certainly noticed individual variation in eggshells since forever. Sometimes eggs seem to almost burst when cracked on the side of the pan & the whole shell all but shatters. But I’m not suggesting my experience now is any different than last year or 20 years ago.
Rather than shells getting thinner, here’s a different possibility for your perception of thinner shells. To wit:
Thin shells tend to break in the carton more easily and hence more often than do more robust shells. So you probably don’t buy cartons containing very many thin shells; they’re already broken when you inspect the carton before purchase. If the egg supplier has gotten gentler handling equipment, or better cushiony egg cartons, more thin shells will survive later into the multi-step journey from hen to frypan. Suggesting that the input mix of thin & thick might well be the same, but the output mix you’re bringing home to your fridge has changed. Heck, just having a less ham-fisted egg stocker at your local grocery store might do it.
Anecdata:
I used to shop at a store where I watched the egg guy restocking the cooler from a pallet. This guy was a total oaf & I suspect he broke 5+% of the eggs whose cartons he touched. I’d often look through 5+ cartons to find an unbroken dozen. Those were some stout-shelled eggs on average.
It varies from carton to carton, IME. Maybe it’s their different diets, but free-range seem to have tougher shells.
You might try cracking them on a plate or just on the countertop instead of the side of the pan. They tend not to shatter that way. I like to show off and do a one-handed crack and delivery to the pan.
I only ever crack eggs when baking. Hold the egg iny left hand, hit it with the dull edge of a butter knife in my right hand. I’ve heard that make a cleaner break than something like the corner of a countertop.
Isn’t this how DDT was killing hawks and eagles decades ago? It was accumulating in their food chain and causing them to lay eggs with brittle shells, and fewer chicks were hatching. So there may be precedent for something in the diet affecting the quality of eggshells.
The thickness or thinness of egg shells is a reflection of how much (or how little) calcium the hen has in her diet. Thin shells almost always mean they are not getting enough calcium.
Look through one carton.
If there are any broken eggs that are still removable, remove them and place them aside.
Select another carton and swap the cracked ones for uncracked ones.
Repeat as necessary.
Place the carton with the crack eggs back on the shelf open.
If other people catch on to this trick the cracked eggs will be isolated to a few cartons that the store can remove from sale.
Yes.
We go through 2-6 eggs a day on this house and it’s always been ups and downs for shell thickness. Some seem like I’m always fishing bits of shell out, some require an act of God to open. It’s on a carton to carton basis so I assume it’s just what the birds at that egg factory were eating that week.
I like that word - chippier. Perfect description.
I did the consolidate bad eggs trick for years.[quote=“crowmanyclouds, post:6, topic:1015539”]
If other people catch on to this trick the cracked eggs will be isolated to a few cartons that the store can remove from sale.
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As far as I could tell, they did not. So I quit.
People: whaddayagonnado?
Ya can’t live with 'em and, for some reason, ya can’t kill 'em.
My brother-in-law has a PhD in Philosophy but grew up on an Ontario chicken farm, so I call him a member of “The Poultry-Canadian Community”. I asked him this exact question several years ago, and he said that yes, they carefully control the amount of calcium in the feed to optimize costs (less calcium) vs. breakage.
My own observation has been that free-range and the like–the more expensive* eggs–tend to have thicker shells.
*Except that with egg prices so crazy lately, free-range has often been cheaper than generic store brand. Go figure.
Yes, we used to do this as well. People, as a rule, don’t care. I was in a grocery store once and this 70-80 year old guy ripped open a bag of coffee grabbed some out, smelled it, then shoved it back on the rack and wandered off.
Interesting. But it makes sense when you think about it.
P.S. Nice flex on how wealthy you are 
Perhaps it’s a function of the particular brands available here, but brown eggs (though quite the same inside) are consistently thicker shelled than the white ones. I end up with fewer bits of shell from the white eggs because the brown require more force.
Our local eggs here in RI have thinner shells, and somehow a stronger membrane under the shell. When you crack an egg the shell fractures but does not open until you strike it hard enough to spew some of the contents. If I crack one on the rim of a bowl or pan in preparation for making scrambled or fried eggs a fair bit ends up on the counter or stove top. The change appears to have corresponded with new regulations for raising chickens. I have no problems with these regulations if they are actually good for the chickens because I’d rather have eggs from healthy chickens that haven’t been fed a bunch of chemicals. But it’s clear the eggs have changed. They are also smaller, probably the minimum size for ‘Large’ eggs, and larger ‘Jumbo’ eggs seem to be unavailable, though I’m fine with ‘Large’ eggs at the current typical size.
Yeah, that’s been my experience here in the UK - it used to be that we would never see white eggs in the shops, but from the start of the pandemic they became common. I find them really fragile and I prefer not to buy them.
In addition to regular eggs that we use for baking and general purpose cooking, I typically buy a half dozen Burford Browns which we reserve for poached eggs on toast and the like, for breakfast (where we want to enjoy a liquid yolk - these come from very high-welfare-standard flocks and the shells are noticeably thicker and stronger than even regular brown eggs.
I crack eggs on a flat surface rather than the edge of a bowl or with a utensil - this seems to reduce the likelihood of shell pieces ending up in the bowl.
I noticed that this morning. I hate that! Had to dig my finger into the damn thing to get it open. Messy and a pain in the ass.
Thankfully, I’ve pretty much gone off eggs and probably won’t replace them when they are gone.
I had backyard chickens for over a decade. Anecdotal experience is it’s all about the calcium. Chicken feed is by capitalistic nature to be the “right” mix of cost vs chicken nutrients. My chickens could get really thin shells, to the point of being soft and translucent. A day or three of ground up oyster shells in the chicken run fixed that issue.
After I gained more experience with backyard chickens, I would always throw at least a handful of ground up oyster shells into the run every week.