An Egg Experiment

The Egg Experiment

(Note to people concerned about the welfare of animals:  They are "cagefree" eggs.  I'm looking for a good source of locally produced eggs.)

Frank and I made a pound cake the other day.  Very dense stuff is pound cake.  However, Frank momentarily forgot this at one point and cut off a big honkin' piece.  Halfway through he realized his mistake: that pound cake is not angel food cake.  No, I said, angel food cake has 14 egg whites (according to Joey though a google search suggests 12 egg whites is common) which makes it very fluffy, whereas poundcake has 4 whole eggs.  Frank, ever frugal-minded, wondered, maybe a little concerned, "how much of the egg are you throwing out when just using the egg whites?"  I thought maybe 50%?  We had to see.  

Above are four separated eggs.  Just under 3 ounces of egg yolk, 5 ounces of egg whites.  When you're throwing out the egg yolks, you're throwing out 3/8ths of the egg.  So, if you're making an angel food cake and using 14 2-ounce eggs, you're throwing out 5.25 eggs by volume per cake.  Now, we didn't weigh the egg whites and egg yolks.  If we have a sensitive enough scale, I think we'll have to do this next time.  How much denser is the egg yolk than the egg white?  And/Or, if you beat egg whites versus beating a full egg, how much less dense is the result?  Are the four eggs in pound cake denser than the 12-14 egg whites in angel food cake?  Certainly they would be once you beat them, right?

Not having cooked with eggs for years now, I'm newly intrigued by the properties of these little guys.

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Bodhi kitty cuddling my hip in my sleeping bag

I'm back in Chicago now for a week.  Had a going away "party" with some of my co-workers last night: they are all so sweet and kind and I will miss them.  Sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor in an empty apartment.  No food in the house except some frozen fruit and tator tots.  :)  My cats seemed somewhat stressed out by it all (me being gone for awhile with no furniture in the house, I presume), but after some hardcore cuddling and massaging, they've calmed down a little.  Massage is so great for calming that sympathetic nervous system.  

I guess tator tots are potatoes.  I can have them for breakfast, right?