Share your egg management tips!

[becstalls]

After reading the local extension literature regarding the rules for washing eggs for sale in Pennsylvania, I usually just spot clean the dirty ones with a damp/soapy paper towel and then dry. Because eggs for sale here are required to be refrigerated, they also have to be washed because the refrigeration causes contraction of the egg, pulling germs through the pores.

I’m really curious to know what the regulations are in the UK, where eggs for sale are kept at room temp.

 

[Shadrach]

I leave them in the nest generally hoping a hen will sit on them.
Occasionaly I steal a couple when I fancy a fry up.
Those I do take home I leave unwashed and unrefridgerated.
The last egg I ate was nine weeks old and the yolk still held together when I cracked it open.

 

[NatJ]

I’m really curious to know what the regulations are in the UK, where eggs for sale are kept at room temp.

Here is a page by a British organization dealing with egg safety:
https://www.egginfo.co.uk/egg-safety/storage-and-handling
They recommend storing eggs below 20c (which would be about 68F)
They also recommend that the fridge is the best place to store eggs in most kitchens.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/rules-on-marketing-standards-for-eggs.html
This talks about the European Union rules for eggs.
It includes the "do not chill below 5C" that we keep hearing about. (5C is about 41F).

My google search also found people saying the European Union should change their standards, because refrigeration allows eggs to be stored longer while still having good quality for eating, and because they state a minimum temperature and call for a "constant temperature" but do not actually regulate that constant temperature or forbid having eggs at high temperatures. I have not tried to read the regulations enough to know if they actually do restrict high temperatures or not (as in, the complaining pages might or might not be right about that.)

 

[My Very First 6 Chickens]

Do you wash them on collection day then store in the fridge? Do you wait till you've built up a dozen, then wash and store in a clean carton? Am I overthinking this??

So far I've just been refrigerating immediately, then giving them a rinse before use. Doesn't feel very efficient, especially coming from grocery store eggs where you just crack and go.

Would love to hear what everyone else does

Crack and go Baby!!!

 

[Ponypoor]

Do you wash them on collection day then store in the fridge? Do you wait till you've built up a dozen, then wash and store in a clean carton? Am I overthinking this??

So far I've just been refrigerating immediately, then giving them a rinse before use. Doesn't feel very efficient, especially coming from grocery store eggs where you just crack and go.

Would love to hear what everyone else does

I don’t wash unless they are dirty, then o give the dirty ones a good scrub to remove any poopies, etc.

Then I let them dry, put in a carton and refrigerate. I sell my eggs so they need to be clean.

I don’t wash my otherwise clean eggs prior to use as they will be cooked, killing any pathogens.

 

[Ponypoor]

I leave them in the nest generally hoping a hen will sit on them.
Occasionaly I steal a couple when I fancy a fry up.
Those I do take home I leave unwashed and unrefridgerated.
The last egg I ate was nine weeks old and the yolk still held together when I cracked it open.

I brought about three dozen eggs to my last work site and after 3 months (in the fridge) the last remaining ones were as awesome as the first week I ate one I don’t wash unless dirty.

 

[BigBlueHen53]

I confess I am a little puzzled about washing eggs in warm water, although I do it because we are told to. Understand I'm a little dyslexic so bear with me. I believe it was @aart who said earlier in this thread that we should wash in water warmer than the egg because (I paraphrase) washing in cold water causes the contents of the egg to shrink, drawing the (soapy?) water and/or any dirt or bacteria on the shell through the pores of the shell into the interior of the egg, contaminating it; and I understand this is the prevailing wisdom.

However, this doesn't entirely make sense to me. Here's my question. Shouldn't we wash in cold water instead? Because cold water will cause the shell to shrink, rather than the contents? The shell is dense and, as the protective outer covering of the egg, it seems to me that the shell would shrink first, reacting to the cold, protecting the contents of the egg from feeling the chill of the cold water. In cold water the pores of the shell should shrink and tighten. Of course, this assumes that the one washing the egg does so quickly, before the chill can reach the inner parts of the egg. Conversely, washing the egg in warm water, it seems to me, would cause the pores of the shell to open up - resulting in water, soap and any filth or bacteria on the outside of the egg to leak through the pores of the shell, thus contaminating white and yolk.

This, at least, seems logical and reasonable to me based on the laws of thermodynamics.

 

[NatJ]

I confess I am a little puzzled about washing eggs in warm water, although I do it because we are told to. Understand I'm a little dyslexic so bear with me. I believe it was @aart who said earlier in this thread that we should wash in water warmer than the egg because (I paraphrase) washing in cold water causes the contents of the egg to shrink, drawing the (soapy?) water and/or any dirt or bacteria on the shell through the pores of the shell into the interior of the egg, contaminating it; and I understand this is the prevailing wisdom.

However, this doesn't entirely make sense to me. Here's my question. Shouldn't we wash in cold water instead? Because cold water will cause the shell to shrink, rather than the contents? The shell is dense and, as the protective outer covering of the egg, it seems to me that the shell would shrink first, reacting to the cold, protecting the contents of the egg from feeling the chill of the cold water. In cold water the pores of the shell should shrink and tighten. Of course, this assumes that the one washing the egg does so quickly, before the chill can reach the inner parts of the egg. Conversely, washing the egg in warm water, it seems to me, would cause the pores of the shell to open up - resulting in water, soap and any filth or bacteria on the outside of the egg to leak through the pores of the shell, thus contaminating white and yolk.

This, at least, seems logical and reasonable to me based on the laws of thermodynamics.

You are assuming the eggshell changes size, and especially you are assuming that the pores in the shell can change size.

I never thought to look into this before, but a bit of google searching found a paper from 1979 called "The Avian Eggshell-a Resistance Network" by R. G. BOARD
Hopefully this link will work:
https://ami-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1365-2672.1980.tb01230.x

I think this paragraph might be the most relevant:

"The work of Haines & Moran (1941) can be taken as a milestone in our understanding of the factors involved in the initiation of rotting of stored hens’ eggs.They recorded a low incidence of rots in eggs that had been immersed briefly in a bacterial suspension of the same temperature but a high incidence when the eggs were warmer than the suspension. They deduced that a small negative pressure was generated in the latter case because the contraction of the yolk and white was greater than that of the shell. This caused contaminated water to be sucked into the pore canal. Their deduction has met with general acceptance even though experimental verification is still awaited."

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the 1941 work that was referenced, so I don't know what it actually said.

Part of the 1979 article talks about ways to get antibiotics into eggs (they wanted to hatch healthy chicks from eggs laid by sick hens), and the author considered that putting eggs in a liquid cooler than the egg was a reasonable way to do this. There is some discussion of other methods too (like making a hole in the shell.)

If all this work was done so many years ago, I am not surprised that it is now viewed as common knowledge, but that does make it harder to find explanations of why it works and how that was learned (because not all things that are "common knowledge" are actually right!)

 

[TaylorGlade]

We refrigerate ours and wash when we use them in case a piece of shell falls into an omelet or something. We found they just don't last as long on the counter so we do refrigerate them. But they last longer unwashed so we don't wash them until we use them.

 

[RedwoodCoastChick]

With only 8 layers, we're not completely inundated with eggs -- though there've been plenty to experiment with water glassing, freezing, etc. in anticipation of the winter egg-laying lull. It's just the 2 of us and our nearby daughter's household of 2 eating them. I pencil the collection date on each egg and the initial of who laid it (when I know).

When the fridge egg boxes are full (2 dozen), the newest eggs sit unwashed on the kitchen counter and wait their turn, sorted by color/shade of brown just because it's fun to see who's laying how many, plus the Eggers' greens are slightly different [one more olive-toned, the other more green] and our one blue egg layer [Whiting's True Blue] is such a prolific layer, almost daily since she started in September.

Truly-poopy eggs stay unwashed until I wash & scramble them up to share between the pullets and our 2 dogs (who also adore chicken poop 'treats' when they can sneak them ). I mix dried & crushed eggshells (clean) into the portion I give the chooks and they LOVE it. (I save all our clean eggshells, dry and crush them to add to the oyster shell flakes in their always available "calcium dish".)

Very curious to find out how the water-glassed eggs hold up; I used Mrs. Wage's pickling lime, one ounce:quart of water according to several articles & videos on the topic, in half-gallon wide-mouth glass jars.

Always on the lookout for new low-carb egg recipes! Besides myriad breakfast dishes & casseroles, keto-custards and deviled eggs are big hits, not to mention lots & lots of ever-versatile quiche!