Life as a Spectator Sport

One thing I get asked about is how to store eggs. I've chosen to store them fresh, but for that you need fresh eggs. By which I mean really fresh--not more than 48 hours old and not washed off. Eggs that fresh (and that unwashed) are not available in the supermarket, so another option is to powder them. This is a recipe from a list I'm on. I haven't tried it myself, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

How to Quickly Make Powdered Eggs

Step 1 - Scramble your eggs in a bowl. Pour them in a saute pan and cook until done.
Step 2 - Drain the excess grease for a few minutes on a paper towel.
Step 3 - Break the eggs into tiny pieces.
Step 4 - Spread the eggs out onto a baking sheet.
Step 5 - Dry at 135° F for at least 10 hours.
Step 6 - Run the eggs through a blender until they form a fine powder.
Step 7 - Store your powdered eggs either in a heavy plastic bag, or a jar with a tight lid.

The only problem with powdered eggs, of course, is that you can't use them for recipes that require fresh eggs. Mayonnaise, boiled or deviled eggs, souffles, anything that requires whipped egg whites, all of those require fresh eggs.

If you can get truly fresh eggs (as defined above), there are two good ways that I know of to preserve them. The intent in each case is to prevent oxygen from getting through the shell. Freshly laid eggs have a coating on the shell that inhibits the passage of oxygen. Wash that coating off, and you very quickly no longer have fresh eggs. Even just let the eggs sit in the fridge or at room temperature, and the coating deteriorates (though many farmwives would leave their eggs in a basket in the kitchen for weeks at a time). If you have your own chickens, and your family can almost keep up with egg production, you most likely don't need to preserve them. Just eat them as you can, and when laying slows down in the cooler months, you may still have enough to get through the winter.

But perhaps, like me, you want to make sure you have a winter's worth of fresh eggs. You can preserve them either in salt or in waterglass (sodium silicate). I don't know whether one method works better than the other. I put up about nine dozen eggs in waterglass back in August, more as an experiment than anything else. As things turned out, those were almost the last eggs anyone got from those chickens. No one knows why, but they just stopped laying. They went on strike, for reasons of their own, and they've only just started laying again. So everyone who was buying eggs from that farm was out of luck--except me, heheh. I had more eggs, in fact, than the owner of the chickens.

To preserve eggs in waterglass, you need to find a source for waterglass. I've been told by several people that it's available in pharmacies, but I've never been able to find it there, either in the big box stores (where they didn't even know what it was) or in the small local pharmacy we go to (where they did at least recognize the term, but said they didn't have it and couldn't order it). So I bought it from Lehmans. I did find one other source for it, an online hardware store, but their base price was the same and their shipping was much higher.

I mixed the waterglass with water at a ratio of 11 parts water to 1 part waterglass in a 5-gallon Hardee's pickle bucket, added each egg carefully and watched it float to the bottom. Then I stuck the pail in a corner, not expecting to open it up again until at least January. As I said, events intervened, and we've used almost the entire bucket. In fact, if we weren't away from home so much, we'd have long since used them all.

So how are they different from really fresh eggs (or even supermarket eggs)? The whites do thin out, as you'd expect. In the last couple of weeks, I've found that the yolks were thinning out too, so it was hard sometimes to make a fried egg without breaking the yolk. Taking a dozen out at a time and storing them in the fridge seemed to help with that, no doubt because the cold tended to make the yolks thicker. Not one of the eggs has gone bad. I've broken each one carefully into a separate dish before adding it to the frying pan or recipe. But every one has been good. I've used them for mayonnaise, cookies and muffins, souffles, hard-boiled eggs and bread, and I can't tell them from ordinary fresh eggs. I had been told that you couldn't hard-boil them, that the shells would soften up in the boiling water. But I haven't found that to be the case.

The only hesitation I have about using waterglass is that I found it to be very irritating to my hands. All the information I have about preserving eggs say that waterglass is non-toxic. Perhaps that's true for the very weak solution used to preserve eggs. In fact, one person who told me about her childhood experience with it said that they would renew the solution when "it didn't feel slippery any more." But even the 11 to 1 ratio was extremely irritating to me, and I'd be cautious about having it anywhere that kids could get into it. This MSDS sheet is enough to scare anyone.

I think a safer way to preserve eggs (safer for the family, at any rate) is to pack them in salt. The method is essentially the same. Fresh eggs, within 48 hours of being laid, not washed. (By the way, "not washed" doesn't mean covered in chicken poop--we picked out the cleanest ones.) In earlier days, farmers would have packed them into barrels. I'll use another of my Hardee's pickle buckets, with a layer of salt in the bottom, then a layer of eggs, more salt, and so forth. The idea is the same, to exclude oxygen. As soon as these eggs are used up, I'll be buying another ten dozen, to try them in the salt, and in another six months or so, I'll report on how well they kept.

Here are my eggs in waterglass, on August 25. We're down to fewer than a dozen now.

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