A 70 year old baker in Lisbon told me to weigh my eggs with the shells on, and my sponge cakes got taller

Emma Flores · 2026-09-24T02:10:03.276968+00:00

I was reading through an old bakery forum thread from 2009 last week and a retired baker from a shop in Lisbon dropped this in the comments. She said she always weighed whole eggs in the shell instead of cracking them first, because the shell adds roughly 10 percent to the weight and most old recipes were written that way. I tested it on my genoise three times and every single bake rose about half an inch higher than my usual method. The math works out too: a large egg is around 50g out of the shell but 58g with it, so if you crack first you are shorting your batter by a few grams per egg. I keep a little notepad by my scale now and write down both numbers for every bake. Anyone else here weigh eggs in the shell, or am I late to a party that started decades ago?

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A 70 year old baker in Lisbon told me to weigh my eggs with the shells on, and my sponge cakes got taller | Bakers - Thought Shares