If you’re making soufflés, you’ll be separating a lot of eggs. Here are a few things to keep in mind to make the task easy and efficient.

Make sure your eggs are cold.Cold eggs have firm yolks that will separate more easily from the whites without breaking. If the whites need to be at room temperature, which is better for whipping, leave them on the counter for a half-hour after separating.

Crack your eggs on a flat surface.Though you may have learned to crack eggs on the side of a bowl, cracking them with a firm tap on a flat surface creates fewer bits of egg shell that can find their way into your whites.

Separate by hand.As chefs faced with needing many eggs at a time know, using your hand to separate the yolks from the whites is faster and gives you more control than passing them back and forth between shell halves. Working over a bowl, crack the egg into your hand with fingers spread slightly (as shown above). The egg white will drip through your fingers into the bowl. If necessary, transfer the yolk from one hand to the other to help the process.

Use multiple bowls.If you will be beating the egg whites and need to make sure there is no egg yolk in them, transfer each separated white to a larger bowl so all don’t get contaminated if a yolk happens to break.