She’s also got a good point I hadn’t considered, which is that salmonella (she says “e. coli”, but she means salmonella) very frequently hangs out on the outside of the egg. If you crack your egg on the edge of the bowl the eggs are going into, you run a higher risk of contaminating your bowl, and then your food.
Crack them in the middle on a flat surface. I can also do the trick with an egg in each hand, although there’s really no point in it for a couple of eggs. I remember my father actually getting angry with me when I was showing off by doing the one-handed egg crack. “Cook like a white man, for chrissakes!” I don’t even know what that means.
Eggs + salmonella: never had a problem in 40 years. I used to wash the outside of my eggs when I lived in Africa, but otherwise. . .
This thread has been kind of educational to me in that I’ve never heard of cracking an egg on the end and cannot fathom how that would even work. I crack mine on a flat surface and it seems to work fairly well although I do end up with some counter gloppage.
Yeah, I wish the OP would come back and explain. Does he mean that some people crack their eggs along the poles rather than the equator? This is just…bizarre…to me. If he means do we crack along the middle, latitudinally, but closer to the small end or the big end, I tend to crack in the middle, a little closer to the big end of the egg.
Egg-zactly. That would pretty much describe him. That was one of his fall-back phrases, along with “drive like a white man!” and “quit drivin’ like a farmer!” The man was an enigma.
The end cracking refers to soft boiled in the shell eggs as depicted in Gulliver’s Travels. It spawned the term ‘endian’ used to refer to the order of bit and byte addressing in computers, known as ‘little endian’ and ‘big endian’, little endian of course, being the proper way to do it. I don’t know anybody that cracks raw eggs on either end.
In the case of hard-boiled eggs (which the OP didn’t ask about), the answer is the fat end, of course. That’s where the air sac is and gets the peeling going with ease (if the eggs aren’t too fresh, that is. Super fresh eggs are a pain in the ass to peel, usually.) Or you just roll them. In the case of soft-boiled eggs, of course you begin from the small side. Who puts their eggs upside down into their egg cup (or shot glass, as we did it.)?
I learned the one-handed cracking thing while on KP in the army. I could do one in each hand. The cook who taught me could do two in each hand. Now that’s efficient.
We cracked them on the wide rolled-over edge of a big stainless steel bowl. These days I crack them flat on the counter.
The cook on the Navy ship could do it even faster – he just poured a few cups of powdered egg concentrate into the mixing bowl. Then he threw in a couple whole eggs, shell & all! When the scrambled eggs were served, a few sailors would complain loudly about shell in their eggs. And somebody else at their table would say “at least on this ship you’re getting real eggs, instead of that powdered crap.” And all the sailors were happy about the food onboard.