Double-Yolked Eggs Made Our “Best Burgers” Better

Photo by Casie Beldo; styling by MartinPatrick3

Have you ever cracked open an egg and seen a pair of yolks staring back at you? Many cultures believe it’s a sign of good luck. At this issue’s “Best Burgers” photo shoot—featuring so many bites that are stupid-delicious with a fried egg—the prep kitchen had double yolks inside every single shell in a carton of jumbo eggs. Lucky us? “At first we thought we should go buy some lottery tickets,” says food stylist Lara Miklasevics, who tweezered and performed burger surgery—er, “burgery”—on each sandwich. “And then as we kept cracking them, it turned into ‘This is crazy.’” Two participating chefs, Shane Oporto (Birch’s Lowertown) and Thomas Boemer (Revival), concurred that it was bizarre.

Or so we thought. There’s some science behind it, according to Larry Schultz. Like many families and restaurants across Minnesota, we got these eggs from Schultz’s Owatonna-based organic farm. Hens that are younger than one year, and still learning how to lay eggs, are the most likely to be double-yolk producers. “We have a new young flock coming into production,” Schultz says. “People say, ‘What are you feeding your chickens?’ But it’s typical for every new flock.” Unsurprisingly, the doubled eggs are bigger in size and get sorted and sold that way. That’s how this carton of jumbos ended up with a whole dozen.

Stellar burger shots aside, this good-luck charm proved to be an additional challenge to get properly proportioned fried eggs with a “normal” appearance, like the one nestled on the Gianni’s steak burger featured in the story. But totally worth it. After all, “If a shell ain’t cracked, it’s still a good egg,” Schultz adds. Couldn’t be more true if he said it twice.