Do not fear, citizens. Enemy of the People Quimby will be re-educated at our Siberian Cooking School for 25 years until he learns how to fry eggs properly.
And then he will be punished.
I’ve been frying eggs since I was about 9 (we’ll just say a few decades ago). I simply put a pat of butter for each and crack the egg on top. I like mine over medium so I flip with a spatula if I’m doing several, or just flip with the pan if only doing one or maybe two if I’m feeling brave. My kids like the yolk solid so I crack it in the pan as normal and take a fork and poke the yolk and shake it a bit. I’ve never needed a cup or a saucer or anything else, and I’ve almost never had a yolk break unless I intended it to.
I mostly have access to light brown and white eggs here, but the shells are strong and heavy. When I recently visited New Zealand where the eggs were American style (graded, sorted, and sized), I couldn’t help but make a mess smashing them for the first few days with my overpowered muscle memory!
It’s a good method, for those too skittish to flip an egg. Make sure your heat isn’t TOO high – med-high at most – and set your timer for ONE MINUTE once you splish in a touch of water (for steam) and cover the pan. That gives you enough time to pour some juice and another cup of coffee, and I’ve never had a hard yolk.
Aha! I will try this, thanks.
Nope. Breed of chicken. White chicken: white eggs. Brown chicken: brown eggs.
A hen’s diet affects the color of the yolk, not the shell. Former chicken raiser.
Yes, consumers noticed that caged hens have pale yolks, and free-range hens have brighter, orange-r yolks, due to the greens and bugs they eat. So now caged hens are fed supplemental antioxidants to affect their yolk colour, made from marigold leaves, orange peels, and carrots. The antioxidants do come through in the yolks, but not as well as just consuming them from the plant source. It’s also culturally driven. Interesting article on yolk colour here.
Oh. Welp, slap me with a wet noodle and call me a dumbass.
Don’t feel bad: this is new information to me as well!
They could still be relatively old. Try an egg fresh from the hen one day, there’s a huge difference in how together the egg stays compared to a supermarket egg. That said, I use supermarket eggs, crack on the side of the pan and drop them straight in, I don’t have problems with broken yolks.
When I was in grade school some people brought a bunch of farm animals right onto the school grounds to show us. One showed us two hens and said that if a hen has white ear lobes she will lay white eggs; if she has red ear lobes she will lay brown eggs.
For those questioning the use of the cup or bowl, maybe the OP was going by the advice in this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=352004&highlight=eggs