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Cooking with David

The Sizes of Eggs

Copyright © 2020 by David E. Ross

I buy eggs at my favorite small grocery. They used to carry extra large eggs, but now they only carry large and jumbo. This caused some consternation for both my wife and me because we were used to how many extra large eggs to use in a recipe. Therefore, I did some research.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) sets minimum weights for different sizes of eggs:

small: 42.5 g or 1.5 oz
medium: 49.6 g or 1.75 oz
large: 56.7 g or 2 oz
extra-large: 63.8 g or 2.25 oz
jumbo: 70.9 g or 2.5 oz

Wikipedia: Chicken egg sizes

NOTE: The highest quality rating for jumbo eggs is A. The stress on a chicken to lay a jumbo egg apparently prevents a rating of AA.

From the USDA specifications, I developed the following tables. Since no one is expected to actually take a fraction of an egg, experience or trial-and-error is required to determine whether to round up or round down when substituting one size of eggs for another size.

Your recipe calls for large eggs, but you have a different size.
Recipe Wants Large	You have this
Recipe Wants Large	Extra-Large	Jumbo
1	0.9	0.8
2	1.8	1.6
3	2.7	2.4
4	3.6	3.2
5	4.4	4.0
6	5.3	4.8

Your recipe calls for extra-large eggs, but you have a different size.
Recipe Wants Extra-Large	You have this
Recipe Wants Extra-Large	Large	Jumbo
1	1.1	0.9
2	2.3	1.8
3	3.4	2.7
4	4.5	3.6
5	5.6	4.5
6	6.8	5.4

Your recipe calls for jumbo eggs, but you have a different size.
Recipe Wants Jumbo	You have this
Recipe Wants Jumbo	Large	Extra-Large
1	1.3	1.1
2	2.5	2.2
3	3.8	3.3
4	5.0	4.4
5	6.3	5.6
6	7.5	6.7

12 January 2020