Pickled Eggs

This are a really yummy and healthy snack or addition to salads, sandwiches, a topper for ramen or rice…pretty much anything. We keep them in the refrigerator but some people in cooler climates keep them in a cold outdoor area or porch. Do Not Get Botulism.

The pickling process we followed is from these guys so if you want more information in video form definitely check out their video and do the things that will help their channel grow.

To peel the eggs, bring a pot of water to a boil and then add in the eggs with a spider or slotted cooking spoon or pasta scoop. Cook them for 12 minutes or more depending on how hard you like your hard-boiled eggs. Then remove them to an ice bath and/or running cold water: you want to cool them down as quickly as possible. This will (perhaps, if you’re fortunate) make them easier to peel.

The basic pickling solution for these eggs is half vinegar (5 percent) and half unchlorinated water. Add whatever amount of salt and sugar you like and bring to a boil. Layer your peeled eggs and aromatics in clean, sterile glass canning jars. Some ideas: sliced beets, whole cloves, other “sweet” spices, black peppercorns, maybe some extra sugar in the brine. Soy sauce, sliced carrots, crushed garlic, scallions or lemongrass, red pepper flakes or sichuan pepper, rice wine vinegar. Crushed garlic, sliced red onion, black peppercorns, dill. Crushed garlic, sliced onion, sliced spicy peppers, black peppercorns.

Once you have your eggs and other ingredients in the jars, (don’t pack too tightly, leave room at the top,) use a funnel to pour in the hot pickling liquid until it covers the top of the eggs. Then put the lids on the jars. It’s possible that hot-packing with the hot pickling liquid will “seal” the jars, but these are not canned shelf-stable. (Don’t bother trying to run them through an actual canning process, that’s a bad idea with eggs.)

In the jars kept in a cool, refrigerated place these eggs will keep a very long time, if you can keep from eating them that is.

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.

Eating chicken is kind of weird

Don’t feel guilty, but…

Chicken is really cheap. Most folks eat a lot of it. We and other pastured poultry producers raise chickens using humane, healthy, natural farming practices, and we do our best to keep the cost down as much as we can, though of course raising healthy, natural chickens costs more than chickens raised in cages.

The fact that basic cage-raised, soy-fed chicken is so cheap is a prime example of how completely insane our modern food system is.

Let’s do some math. There are about 1300 calories in a whole chicken of around 4 pounds.

Alternatively, a laying hen that free ranges might lay 250 eggs a year. That’s approximately TWENTY THOUSAND CALORIES

…

We’re going to stop doing math now because it ought to be obvious that you have to be insane to kill the chicken and eat it instead of collecting the eggs. (Don’t feel bad, we’re crazy about grilled chicken in our family.)

Oh, and by the way, the chicken you are eating takes about 10 pounds of grain to get to size if it’s raised in a little cage so it can’t burn off any of those precious calories being healthy, whereas the layer hen can forage for almost everything she needs given the right environment, with some supplemental nutrition to ensure she remains healthy, such as calcium for strong egg shells. The frankenchicken broiler will never produce eggs, whereas the laying hen can still be put into a flavorful and healthy stew or soup stock after she has lived a long, happy, productive life.

So TWENTY THOUSAND calories from running around eating bugs (chemical-free pest control), or one-fifteenth of that if you feed more than twice as much in grain as you get back in meat.

A stopped clock is right sometimes

A vegetarian, no meat diet is horribly unsustainable, but much of the criticism of modern meat consumption is on target. Please enjoy your chicken dinner (we do) but don’t take it for granted. Mass market chicken prices are the result of underpaid labor, undervalued cropland, and petroleum reserves exploited without regard for future generations.

Holistic farm management

We raise meat chickens as an important partner species in our dynamic program of holistic farm management. Because broiler chickens (even the free rangy types) range less than layers, we can move them around the farm to areas where we want to add chicken manure. This lets us naturally apply fertilizer straight from the chicken to areas of the pasture that look like they need a little extra help. However, there is a limit to the number of broiler chickens we will raise in a year, because adding too much natural chicken manure fertilizer to our pastures would be counterproductive.

We also sometimes put the broilers next to our sheep or pigs to help with pest control, although the heritage layer hens tend to be better at this overall.

In a sensible food system, a nice roast chicken dinner would be a treat: perhaps something special to make with the family for a Sunday meal. That’s why we encourage our customers to make sure to use the whole bird. Save those bits and pieces of leftovers and make chicken salad or tacos the next day, and save the bones to make bone broth. Before corporate agribusiness, that’s exactly how most people ate chicken. Even though our chickens cost more than the confinement-raised birds at the supermarket, we think that eating this way actually provides better value for your money. It’s also far more sustainable.