The One Ina Garten Baking Rule You Can Totally Ignore (Trust Me, I’ve Tested It)

Even though she’s not a “professionally trained” chef, we can all agree that Ina Garten is a go-to resource for indispensable cooking tips—whether you’re not sure what to make for dinner (roast chicken, silly) or you can’t figure out why said roast chicken tastes like sh*t. (It’s because you used sh*tty olive oil, silly!)

But there’s one specific thing she does in all her baking recipes—we’ll call it a rule—that I, a former pastry cook, am telling you to break.

Ina Garten uses extra-large eggs. In baking, cooking—all of them. She’s even gone on the record to say it. But according to the American Egg Board, large eggs are the most common size in recipe development. In my lifetime, I’ve only ever purchased large eggs. Yet when I sit down to make Beatty’s Chocolate Cake, the Barefoot Contessa is telling me to go to the store and buy a dozen extra-large eggs, of which I’ll use three?

Ina, love ya, but I’m not doing that. Here’s why: In a baking recipe that calls for one or two eggs, you can pretty much use any size interchangeably. Look at this conversion chart:

And I’m not just making that up—it’s according to the aforementioned American Egg Board. The USDA classifies eggs by the average size of a dozen, so even in a carton of large eggs, no two are exactly the same.

That’s not to say egg sizes don’t matter at all in recipes—they do, to an extent. As a general rule, the more eggs in a recipe, the more the size matters. That’s because as you add more eggs, the difference in weight grows. (Hence, the swap only works for two eggs, max.)

As for why Ms. Garten only uses extra large eggs, well, I…don’t know. In 2018, Ina told Bon Appétit, “my assistant said to me once that when she started using extra-large eggs, her baking got better.” Put it in episode of Unsolved Mysteries.