I have been cooking and breaking eggs since about 1959 when I first started cooking breakfast. My Dad said at that time he would give me a ride to Greenbrier Military School for the 7:30 assembly if I would fix breakfast – always two eggs over easy. I suppose that I have prepared 10,000 eggs since then and I can now proclaim Murphy’s Law on cracking an egg.
If you are cracking eggs to whip up for pancakes, for example, the yolks never break. You can stand on top of the counter, crack an egg and drop it on a bowl on the floor and the yolk remains intact. Or if you will be scrambling eggs, it is impossible to get a yolk to break out of the shell, no matter how you abuse it.
But….
If you want to crack a couple eggs to fry and really want the yolks not to break, they always do and your fried eggs end up looking like little yellow cow piles.
I don’t know how they know, but they do. Eggs are highly intelligent creatures and truly enjoy screwing around with human a cooks.
They know, for example, when they will need to come out nice and clean after boiling. If you boil up some eggs for a chopped-up egg salad and it will make no difference how they look, they will be perfect. The shells will practically slither off the eggs and the little hard-boiled fellows will be blemish free.
But…
If you are making deviled eggs and really need the eggs to look like something besides a well-gnawed hunk of protein, they will be a disaster.
I suppose it’s a chicken’s way of getting even for all the eggs we have swiped from the nest.