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Egg composition weight ratios

One of the farmers at the market asked me to measure the weights of some of their different sizes of eggs and come up with a substitution chart. As you can see, the large eggs, which are usually assumed to be 2 oz, are actually closer to 1.75, and the XL eggs are pretty close to 2 oz. Granted, this is a statistically insignificant sample, but I did a few eggs of each size and they were all pretty close, within .1 oz on either side of these averages (not accounting for the error on my scale).

The yolk weights in the large and xl eggs were pretty similar, the main difference between those eggs being in the amount of white. The yolks in the jumbo eggs were much larger, but with a ratio more similar to the xl eggs. This is a problem if you want to try to scale up or down. In order to get it closer, you'd have to scale your whites and yolks separately.

I put together this little chart showing how to scale the whites and yolks up for 2-5 eggs. I need to think about a better way to represent this.

The short answer is that there's no really easy way to scale recipes from one size of egg to another, but that also begs the question of whether the egg sizes are even really standard to begin with.

In my experience, most recipes won't fail if you throw in another egg (or the equivalent in using larger eggs), you'll just get slightly different results - it'll be more spongy or slightly more watery, or just more eggy than the author of the recipe intended. Or, it may not, because they may have been using larger eggs than you to begin with. My advice is to just try it with larger eggs and see if it actually makes a difference.

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Uploaded on May 24, 2009

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Ernesto Neto installation at the Park Avenue Armory

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Uploaded on May 20, 2009

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Ernesto Neto installation at the Park Avenue Armory

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Uploaded on May 20, 2009

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Ernesto Neto installation at the Park Avenue Armory

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Uploaded on May 20, 2009

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