Eager to promote my method, I discussed with Todd a 2005 article in The New Yorker that profiled professional egg cooks. In it, author Burkhard Bilger writes about Joel Eckerson of Las Vegas's Flamingo hotel: "[Eckerson] rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into two hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Faberge Easter egg." I also tracked down Howard Helmer, a champion egg cracker, who holds the Guinness World Record as the world's fastest omelette maker. I was gratified to find out that he, too, is an edge-of-the-pan man.

Still, out of a sense of curiosity, I decided to give the flat-surface method a try, cracking my next dozen eggs on the test kitchen's stainless-steel countertop. The verdict? I couldn't really tell the difference. The results were neither better nor worse than they were with my old way of breaking eggs. I got back on the phone with Helmer, who is a representative of the American Egg Board. To be honest, he said, the cracking surface doesn't really matter that much. More important is the egg cracker himself: for a clean break and the smallest number of stray shards, the egg should be brought down against the counter or the skillet's edge with a single swift, assertive motion. "People think the shell is so difficult that they have to rap, rap, rap it," Helmer said to me. "People should be a little more fearless."