When I’m teaching classes of young students, I always have them crack eggs for a recipe individually into a separate bowl to avoid getting pieces of shell into their doughs and batters. I tell them that there is nothing worse than eating something soft and getting a crunchy piece of egg shell that was accidentally dropped in. This method also eliminates the rare, but troublesome problem of finding that you have a rotten or bloody egg and having to scoop it out or start over with your recipe. Because of modern equipment, this doesn’t happen very often, but it does occasionally happen.

Unfortunately, I don’t always follow my own advice, and because of time crunches, I just crack the eggs into the bowl of other ingredients. If I do get a piece of shell into my mixture, it is almost impossible to fish out—the small piece of shell seems to avoid a spoon or even my fingers no matter how hard I try to get it. I’ve found that if I use one of the egg shell halves, the elusive piece of shell is attracted to the egg shell halve like a magnet and magically it is easily scooped out.