Sometimes I get the urge to bake something. It is admittedly quite a rare urge, but when it comes it is all too real.

Since I’m not any kind of master baker this normally involves a recipe, and this is where the egg problem arises. Unlike most areas of culinary craft, where you can get by with a reasonable set of taste-buds, a bit of heart and a mere sprinkling of technical knowhow, baking is an exact science where changing quantities and ratios has a huge effect on the end results.

It’s easy enough to look through a book or hop onto Google and find a million recipes, and I have enough basic mathematical knwledge (and conversion charts) to muddle my way through ounces, grams, cups, sticks, or whatever other odd meausurements a recipe might decide to throw at me.

What, until recently, I had not thought to do however is to change the amount of eggs that I used depending on where the recipe came from. You (or at least I) would just assume that a large egg is a large egg, but you couldn’t be more wrong.

Globilisation and standarisation are constantly making our world smaller and bridging differences between cultures and societies, but it seems that this does not extend to eggs.

The difference between a large egg in London and a large egg in New York is not just the 5500km that separates them, but also about 10 grams, and if we wanted to compare it to a large egg in Australia then it all changes again.

If you are only using one egg in a recipe then it really doesn’t make all that much difference, but if you are using four or five then those differences start to add up.

So, for anybody out there who might be bothered by the whole egg size issue and wants to calculate how much egg should be going into their baked delights, I’ve put together this handy little chart showing the difference in egg sizes in different places.

Note: This chart only works for chicken eggs, duck and goose eggs have their own completely non-standardised sizing systems.

If you are using a very old recipe then you might find that you have egg sizes specified by a number. These are ‘traditional’ egg sizes, and I’m going to include a little table of these as well. Partially for completeness, and partially because I love old recipe books, and they come in handy.