How to Halve An Egg For Baking Recipes

Have you ever wanted to make only half a recipe of cookies or a quick bread or a cake…only to find that the original recipe uses only one egg? How do you halve an egg in these cases?

If the recipe asks for two eggs, it’s simple enough to use just one egg if you want to halve the recipe.

But what do you do when you’re dealing with just one?

How….am I supposed to take half of that?

Keep in mind that it is usually baking recipes where people encounter this conundrum. Most savory recipes are flexible and you always use whole eggs. One of two? It’s not usually any big deal that affects the outcome of the dish.

However, baking is all about chemistry and you can’t really go all loosey goosey with the important ingredients if you want the final product to turn out.

I have often wanted to make half a baking recipe and have run into this situation many times where the original recipe requires one egg. I crack an egg into a bowl and look at that one yolk and all the white and think, “Uh….how do I get equal parts yolk and white?”

The key is to actually scramble the egg first with a fork so that you have a relatively cohesive mixture of the yolk and the white!

But then what?

You could try and do it by volume, but that’s a bit hard to measure. It is unlikely to be a nice measurement like 4 tablespoons that could easily be divided in half.

Measuring by weight, however, CAN easily be divided in half and is much simpler!

Here is how to do it step-by-step!

Obviously, since this involves weight, you will need a kitchen scale.

Place an empty bowl on top of your scale and reset it to 0 (on digital scales, there is often a button labelled TARE).

Crack your egg into the bowl and take note of the weight in grams. Most large eggs, on average, will weigh about 50g.

Scramble the egg well in the bowl.

Double check the weight to make sure it is the same as before you scrambled it, which it should be.

Using a spoon, scoop out the some of the scrambled egg into another bowl.

Continue to do this until the weight on the scale is half of what you started with. So in my case, 50 divided by 2 = 25.

And voila! You have have successfully halved an egg!

As for the remaining half that you don’t use for your recipe, combine it with another egg and cook up some scrambled eggs, stir it into some hot chicken soup for egg drop, or use it for another half recipe you want to bake up! Not using it right away? Cover it and keep it in the refrigerator for a day until you’re ready to use it.

A few notes worth remembering:

• Unless otherwise stated, most baking recipes assume you will use large eggs.
• There can be a slight variance of a few grams, but in general, large eggs (out of the shell) weigh about 50g.
• If you are halving a recipe and only have eggs in any size but large, you can still use the weighing method to make sure you have about 25g of egg for your half recipe.

So there you go! Halving an egg for a recipe is actually quite easy and precise, and making half a recipe is completely doable! Happy baking!

~ Lisa.

If you try this out and want to share your photo on Facebook or Instagram, be sure to tag me @dayinthekitchen!

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