The Best Way to Remove a Lost Piece of Eggshell
It’s true that you can’t make an omelet (or any egg dish) without breaking a few eggs. And even if you are the most careful egg cracker, from time to time some shells will fall into the pan. This is not a disaster as it may seem, but it is annoying.
Now, before you tell me to just “smash it on a flat surface,” I need you to know that I don’t think it works as well as people say. I have broken many eggs on many flat surfaces and many hard edges, and I have come to the conclusion that unless you are driving an egg into that hard edge, one method is not particularly better than the other. Both can cause small pieces of shells to remain in the pan. But then again, it doesn’t really matter because there are several ways to get rid of them.
To learn more about dividing eggs, watch the video below:
There are two popular “hacks” for removing these wandering bits of the shell: using most of the shell itself (which we somehow haven’t covered in the last 15 years of this website), and using a wet finger (which we have covered ). The idea of using a large piece of shell is based on the theory that “like attracts like”; the small piece of shell will be attracted to the membrane still attached to the larger piece of shell. The wet finger method promises similar results, claiming that the shell will “pull” towards the wet finger.
To test this, I broke some eggs. I am a very experienced egg cracker, so there was only one piece of shell in the pan, although I was rather rude. I added a few more shell bits (about seven) just to get more data points. Then I tried to remove the shell fragments. I tried to remove half of them with a large piece of shells and half with a wet finger.
The small shell pieces were not attracted to the larger shell piece at all, but the jagged edge of the shell was useful as a scoop. It took at least two and sometimes five attempts to catch a piece of shell by this method. A wet finger turned out to be more successful. Pieces of shell were pulled over it, and I managed to remove them either on the first or second attempt. So, a wet finger definitely won out as the best method for removing shells, but with one small caveat: sticking a (wet) finger into a cold egg lying in a cold frying pan is not dangerous, but things get a little more complicated when that frying pan is hot. Seeing as I fry most of my eggs in hot olive oil , sticking my finger in the pan is not an option. Ah, but there is also an elegant solution to this problem: just break the egg in a cup or mold first. Not only does this give you the ability to remove any small pieces of the shell, but the yolk is less likely to break as you can gently place the egg in a hot skillet rather than splitting it right in the hot, strong oil. … And here it is: no burnt fingers, but beautiful eggs without shells.