Hot take: Room temp eggs aren't worth the hassle for most baking

I keep seeing people freak out about forgetting to take eggs out of the fridge before baking. Look, unless you're making a super delicate French buttercream or something, just run them under warm tap water for 2 minutes. I've been doing this for 5 years at the restaurant I work at and nobody can tell the difference in cakes or cookies. Am I missing something or do people just like making things harder than they need to be?

2 comments

2 Comments

alex_hall911d ago

The thing nobody talks about is that room temp eggs don't even mix the same way in every recipe. I tested this side by side once with a standard yellow cake and the cold egg batter actually came out fluffier because the butter didn't soften too fast during mixing. Warm eggs can make your batter greasy if you're not careful, especially in denser stuff like pound cake where you cream butter and sugar first. So honestly, running them under warm water is fine but I'd rather just use them cold and let the mixer handle the temp balance. You get a better crumb structure that way in my experience.

morgan5121d ago

Wait, did you actually control for the temperature of the butter when you did that side-by-side test? Because I've messed around with this a bunch and I found that if your butter is at 65 degrees, cold eggs actually force you to overmix the batter to get it smooth, which ruins the crumb more than the temp difference. Are you saying the cake was better because the eggs stayed cold or just because the butter didn't get too soft? I feel like that's the key variable nobody checks.

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