How does everyone sanitize their eatin' eggs?

About the fertile egg thing... Hubby is adamant that there's already life in them. And I get that. I dunno, guess I am on the fence about it.

I am sooo glad to know that y'all don't wash them! I was wondering about that.

My husband wont eat our eggs unless I wash them.

He said " do you know where that egg was last! "


I just rince them off quick for his own peace of mind.

Quote:
We are exactly the same way! The benefits of having a good Roo that can sound the alarm, protects the flock, helps with the flock round up, etc. out weigh the possibility of fertilized eggs. Besides, like Brenda, our eggs are collected daily so who knows what may have been fertilized. Our eggs are very clean, rarely one has a little spot of poo that we scrape off with a fingernail. I do keep them refridgerated, just out of habit. But they don't last long in my house anyway.

I think that eggs are refrigerated to slow down their inevitable aging process. Which shouldn't make it a problem to store fresh eggs in any degree kitchen until they're used. They won't spoil, but the longer they set out the more rapidly they will age.

But they will be good to eat for quite a while. I think there's some USDA or Egg Council website with the statistics.

I treat my eggs the way most of you do: don't wash if they're collected clean, dry-rub off any small bits, hot-water wash only the ones with a sticky mess. I do my best to give buying customers the cleanest-looking eggs, the ones that are gathered like that, not washed unnecessarily for sale. Many times I have to leave baskets & cartons of newly-collected eggs on the table due to lack of room in the refrigerator. The cracked or washed eggs will go in the refrigerator first.

I have many busy roosters but you can't tell by looking or tasting the eggs. I usually don't make a big deal of telling folks "These are fertile eggs", just let them know I have roosters & let them do the math.

Once I found a hidden nest with 24 beautiful green eggs. They all looked alike so I suspected only one hen of laying there. Therefore, the oldest egg would have been at least 24 days old. And have been left outside all that time in the broiling Florida sun. But these eggs were so clean & so lovely that I didn't want to waste them....

...so we ate them! I brought them in, stored them in the refrigerator, and used them up over the next week. I cracked them separately into a bowl but they all looked fine, perhaps one or two with a runny yolk.

If those eggs could stay good for so long under those conditions, most other eggs should be fine kept on your counter until you want them.

Quote:
Well, yeah, there's life in them, but that shouldn't be a problem unless you've got deep convictions about eating any animal life form. Which might even eliminate yogurt with active live cultures or yeasted bread, I don't know how far these folks' sensitivities go. Don't get me wrong, I sincerely respect these other points of view. But since I eat chicken I don't feel bad about eating fertile eggs and ending the microscopic life within them.

And we've all eaten hundreds of fertile eggs here and NEVER seen or tasted ANYthing different from unfertilized eggs.

I don't think that there's life until it has been incubated for a couple of days. You know... "activated". There is "potential" life there, but if the egg is taken straight from the nest to the fridge, no one should worry that they're taking a life.

I lightly wash eggs just before I sell them and I try not to refrigerate them unless they accidentally get cracked after they were gathered, so they don't sweat. I am fortunate enough to have someone that sells my eggs at a local farmers market and in the off season I have a feed store that takes my chicken eggs.

I find, especially with duck eggs, no matter how clean their nest box is, some one is playing in a puddle and rolling the eggs with their feet. Also, some of my ducks lay eggs with a dark grey/black bloom, it just doesn't look pretty. I only use a little soap on the tough areas and find that when I rinse the eggs by dipping them in a sink of room temp water that it helps me know if any are older than I thought or hairline cracked. As my children are in charge of gathering, you can imagine that they may not be as meticulous as I am about checking every spot every day... much less mentioning that an egg might be questionable.

On the whole fertile egg thing... if they don't ask, I don't bring it up and I haven't ran into any problems.

Hi

Good to see that everybody has the same methods more or less. We do the same; don't wash until right before sale, and then only if they need it. I do inspect them carefully and if there are any weak spots or defects in them, I usually don't sell those..just in case..but most of the time I keep the slightly defective ones for us to eat and they're fine. Our neighbor, when he used to keep chickens, kept his eggs in a root cellar...and never in a refrigerator at all.