Preserving eggs

WARNING: Never ever preserve farm fresh eggs. Never store eggs outside the refrigerator. You will automatically die. Nobody has ever preserved eggs before without refrigeration and lived to write detailed accounts of how to do it which you can find online.

Hypothetically speaking, in a popular computer simulation game, around this time of year our laying hens start to lay more eggs.

Like, a lot more eggs.

In the future we plan to pass some of those on to our CSA members, but we like to provide fresh eggs to our customers so we don’t like to save up eggs for weeks between CSA drops. Our farm fresh eggs do keep extremely well, in part because we never wash them until we are ready to use them, which keeps their natural protective coating on them. Our farm is a mile off the main road so we can’t really sell them at a roadside stand, and we don’t have access to any markets right now to sell our eggs.

Come summertime we always sell out of all the eggs our layers produce, so it’s nice to have a stockpile for the family so we don’t have to take them out of potential sales. Likewise at the end of the summer it’s nice to put some eggs by so that we have eggs during the winter. Our hens do still produce during the winter, but sometimes it’s not enough.

The two ways we have (in a computer simulation) tried preserving eggs have both worked, but one worked better than the other.

Freezing works really well

Freezing egg yolks is kind of difficult and makes them strange, so what we do is scramble a whole mess of uncooked eggs and then pour the mixture into muffin tins. Then we freeze them. After they are completely frozen we pop out the egg-pucks using a butter knife and store them in a zip-top bag in the freezer. Each tin holds the equivalent of about 3 eggs (depending on how big the eggs are) which, when defrosted, is the perfect size for an omelette.

This method would work better if we had a silicone muffin…not-tin, but whatever one calls a muffin tin made out of silicone. It’s a little difficult to get the frozen egg-pucks out of our metal muffin tins, and a little messy because we generally have to slightly melt the bottom by putting it on a hot stove or (carefully) turning it upside-down under hot water, and then using a butter knife to pry out the frozen eggs. Of course an ice-cube tray would work as well as a muffin tin, but egg-cubes are a less efficient use of space. And, as mentioned, the amount of scrambled egg mixture that fits in each muffin-tin cup is a good portion.

Slaked lime works also

Preserving eggs in lime-water prevents air (and thus bacteria) from getting into the shells. This is lime as in calcium hydroxide, not the fruit. You know, calcium - the same stuff the egg shell is made out of? The calcium hydroxide covers the eggs and fills in the tiny pores in the egg shell, making it completely airtight. It’s extremely important to use food-grade lime, such as is sold for making some kinds of pickles, and not lime sold at a building materials and hardware store. Eating the industrial-grade stuff would be a very bad idea. Your computer simulation game would likely end with a game over.

We mixed the food-grade calcium hydroxide with boiling water and let it cool, then carefully put the eggs into it. We filled a 2 gallon bucket with eggs and covered them completely with the limewater, then an air-tight lid. In strong concentrations calcium hydroxide causes chemical burns. One doesn’t use that strong a concentration just to preserve eggs, but it still feels weird on your skin and it may be best to wear gloves.

Then we put a lid on the bucket and left it for five months.

This method worked…but this was during the hottest part of the summer, and we don’t have a real root cellar, so while the bucket full of limewater eggs wasn’t boiling in the summer sun, it still sat at temperatures well over seventy degrees. The method did preserve the eggs: they were not rotten at all and the yolks were still nicely yellow. However, the yolks had degraded and become somewhat gelatinous in texture, and just kind of fell apart when cracked open. Had these been the only eggs we had, we would have eaten them, but since we had bags full of frozen eggs available we fed the limewater eggs to our pigs, who loved them. Stored in a cooler environment this method would have worked great, and it has the benefit of preserving the whole egg, unscrambled.