Preserving eggs without refrigeration...

[SheepDog]

EGG PRESERVATION WITH LIME

Put some lime in a large vessel, and slack it with boiling water till it is of the consistence of thin cream. You may allow a gallon of water to a pound of lime. When it is cold, pour it off into a large stone jar. Be sure that the eggs are fresh and place them in the jar, with the pointed ends down, being sure that each end is perfectly sound. Cover the jar closely. See that the eggs are always well covered with the lime-water, and lest they should break, avoid moving the jar. If you have hens of your own, keep a jar of lime-water always ready, and put in the eggs as they are brought in from the nests. Jars that hold about six quarts are the most convenient. It will be well to renew the lime-water occasionally.


EGG PRESERVATION WITH WATER GLASS

Putting eggs down in a solution of water glass is without doubt the most satisfactory method of storing them in the home.

The commercial form of water glass is usually a mixture of potassium and sodium silicate, which, besides being cheaper than that which is chemically pure, is the kind that is preferred for the purpose of preserving eggs. To make a solution of the desired strength to preserve eggs satisfactorily, dissolve one part water glass in seven parts of warm water that has first been boiled to drive off bacteria, mold, spores, etc. With the solution thoroughly mixed, it is ready to pour over the eggs.

In selecting eggs for the purpose of storing, be careful to choose only those which are clean, fresh, and perfectly sound, and, if possible, infertile. It is advisable not to wash them before they are put into the preservative, for they will keep better if their bloom is not removed. Place the eggs in receptacles in the manner explained for preserving eggs in limewater, and over them pour the water-glass solution until they are all covered. If the eggs so prepared are stored in a cool place, they will keep as long as those preserved in limewater and there will be no danger of their acquiring any foreign flavor.

Do not use commercial eggs for storing - they are washed and the pores of the shell are open. Use onle eggs directly from the chicken.

 

[Dani]

I've been pickling and then canning which is great for me, but there is a limit on uses with them. I love them with my salads. I have looked for food grade lime at our local stores but haven't found any. Is there another name it might be sold under?

 

[Caribou]

Put down a layer of sand or sawdust. Lay down your fresh eggs with, with the bloom on, so that none are touching any other then cover with more sand or sawdust. Repeat till the box is full. You're probably good for around five months.

 

[Dani]

Put down a layer of sand or sawdust. Lay down your fresh eggs with, with the bloom on, so that none are touching any other then cover with more sand or sawdust. Repeat till the box is full. You're probably good for around five months.

Pointy side up, right?

 

[dademoss]

Pointy side DOWN, fat end UP : http://www.fresheggsdaily.com/2015/01/why-should-eggs-be-stored-pointy-end.html

 

[Sentry18]

So having little to offer this thread, it made me think about a book I had to read in elementary school (the name of which I forget). It had a section in it about how the settlers in the Midwest would take wooden barrels and put layers of sawdust (or hay), then eggs, then sawdust (or hay), then eggs. IIRC they referenced the eggs as precious cargo. Funny how these things come back into your mind.

 

[SheepDog]

Hydrated lime can be purchased at most places that sell bags of concrete and mortar. Lowes, Home Depot and some Ace hardware stores sell it around here. I prefer the Waterglass method because the taste of the eggs is better. The hydrated lime is mixed with one ounce by weight with a quart of water and then well blended. Using quick lime you have to hydrate it first and make it into hydrated lime before using it.
They will both keeps eggs fresh for over eight months.

 

[Terri9630]

I just keep chickens.

 

[Flight]

I Jane never heard of this before, won't the lime leach into the egg and alter it's taste?

 

[Amish Heart]

I just keep chickens, too. Usually have too many eggs.

 

[Weedygarden]

Pointy side DOWN, fat end UP : http://www.fresheggsdaily.com/2015/01/why-should-eggs-be-stored-pointy-end.html

That is how they are packaged in egg cartons in the grocery stores.

 

[SheepDog]

Using the hydrated lime does affect the taste a bit but the waterglass method does not.
When winter comes and your chickens are resting from laying as much it is nice to have fresh eggs for breakfast.

 

[UncleJoe]

We just don't wash them until we use them. They'll keep for 2-3 months without refrigeration. That gets us most of the way through winter.

 

[joel]

I found this some time ago.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/how-to-store-fresh-eggs-zmaz77ndzgoe

These techniques will help you learn how to store fresh eggs on the homestead.
Photo By Fotolia/Springfield Gallery
These tips will help you learn how to store fresh eggs on the homestead.

How To Store Fresh Eggs
If you've ever kept a flock of chickens, you're probably aware of a basic perversity of homestead life: While your family's consumption of eggs tends to remain fairly constant year round . . . your hens' production of the delicious edibles doesn't.

Is there a way to level out this feast-or-famine scheme of things . . . is there a way for you to stash away one month's surplus cackleberries and then eat 'em, say, six or eight months later?

Yep. Several forms of egg storage are supposed to make it possible for you to do just that. As MOTHER's continuing tests have already proven, however, some of those "guaranteed" methods of storage work a whole lot better than others!


-Advertisement-
According to an old joke, "The best way to keep an egg fresh is to keep it in the chicken." A heck of a bunch of MOTHER readers, though, must find that a little hard to do. Because if we've been asked once since founding this magazine, we've been asked a thousand times, "is there any way I can save one month's surplus eggs ... and then use them six or eight months later?"

Well, for several years, we answered that question by recommending one or another (or several) of the "guaranteed, gen-u-wine egg preservation" methods that we'd run across in old farm magazines, ancient Department of Agriculture pamphlets, and other sources. And, although we usually asked the folks we'd advised to let us know how the ideas worked, we never seemed to hear from them again . . . .


And that left us with, at best, an uneasy feeling. "What happened, anyway?" we asked each other. "Did the idea (or ideas) work? Were the eggs good? After how long? Were they bad? When did they go bad? And how bad did they get? Could they still have been eaten in a pinch? Maybe they were still good, but they just changed color . . . or texture . . . or something. WHAT HAPPENED, ANYWAY?"

So we mulled that over for a while and finally, about seven months ago, we figured that enough was enough. "By grannies," we told each other, "we'll just set up a test that'll — once and for all — answer all the questions we have about storing fresh eggs."

And that's exactly what we did. We went out and bought ourselves 30 dozen guaranteed fresh, washed, uniform-sized, agribiz-type, unfertile, supermarket eggs from a wholesaler . . . and we also rounded up another 30 dozen fresh, unwashed, nonuniform, homestead-type, fertile, non-supermarket eggs.


-Advertisement-
Keeping Eggs Fresh: 20 Controlled Batches of 36 Eggs Each
We suspected from the beginning that there might be a difference in the keeping qualities of fertile versus unfertile eggs. (Our tests have since shown that there is . . . and that difference is weighed heavily in favor of the fertile eggs, but perhaps not for the reasons you might have thought.) So we started right off by dividing our 60 dozen hen fruit right down the middle, with 30 dozen fertile eggs on one side and 30 dozen unfertile eggs on the other.

 

[UncleJoe]

I found this some time ago.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/how-to-store-fresh-eggs-zmaz77ndzgoe

From the above article:

If we'd had our druthers, understand, we'd have eaten something else . . . but, under survival conditions, we could have lived on the completely unprotected 90-day-old eggs if we'd have had to.

That's about what we found.

Production goes down dramatically in November and picks up again around the end of February/early March. By February the 3 month old eggs are getting a bit runny but are still edible. But we tend to check each one before using it in a recipe or cracking it into a skillet.

 

[joel]

This is an old article from 1977, but we had true free range chickens on the farm before this was in print.
My mother would break every egg in a bowl before using it for the same reason.
Most of our egg were only a day old or so, but never judge the egg by its shell.

 

[Meerkat]

I just keep chickens.

Me too. But it is good to know.

 

[JamesY]

EGG PRESERVATION WITH LIME

Put some lime in a large vessel, and slack it with boiling water till it is of the consistence of thin cream. You may allow a gallon of water to a pound of lime. When it is cold, pour it off into a large stone jar. Be sure that the eggs are fresh and place them in the jar, with the pointed ends down, being sure that each end is perfectly sound. Cover the jar closely. See that the eggs are always well covered with the lime-water, and lest they should break, avoid moving the jar. If you have hens of your own, keep a jar of lime-water always ready, and put in the eggs as they are brought in from the nests. Jars that hold about six quarts are the most convenient. It will be well to renew the lime-water occasionally.


EGG PRESERVATION WITH WATER GLASS

Putting eggs down in a solution of water glass is without doubt the most satisfactory method of storing them in the home.

The commercial form of water glass is usually a mixture of potassium and sodium silicate, which, besides being cheaper than that which is chemically pure, is the kind that is preferred for the purpose of preserving eggs. To make a solution of the desired strength to preserve eggs satisfactorily, dissolve one part water glass in seven parts of warm water that has first been boiled to drive off bacteria, mold, spores, etc. With the solution thoroughly mixed, it is ready to pour over the eggs.

In selecting eggs for the purpose of storing, be careful to choose only those which are clean, fresh, and perfectly sound, and, if possible, infertile. It is advisable not to wash them before they are put into the preservative, for they will keep better if their bloom is not removed. Place the eggs in receptacles in the manner explained for preserving eggs in limewater, and over them pour the water-glass solution until they are all covered. If the eggs so prepared are stored in a cool place, they will keep as long as those preserved in limewater and there will be no danger of their acquiring any foreign flavor.

Do not use commercial eggs for storing - they are washed and the pores of the shell are open. Use onle eggs directly from the chicken.

This was pretty common around 1940s. It's proven for sure!

 

[lonewolf]

preserving eggs? I've usually eaten them all long before they went off.
working on a farm once years ago doing some dry stone walling, got an order to clean out the farm house and there were several trays of eggs sitting there(30 eggs in a tray) none of the others would touch them because they were covered in chicken "muck", so took them home and was eating eggs for months, out of the several trays I think there were only 2 bad ones(eggs not trays) do the water test first.

 

[Terri9630]

People usually try to preserve the eggs during the spring/summer when the chickens are going strong so they have plenty when they slow down over the winter.

 

[SheepDog]

I prefer the Sodium Silicate bucket to store eggs. I use trays with handles to lift out the older eggs and then put fresh eggs into another tray and set it in first and then the rest on top. That way I use the oldest eggs first.

 

[Tootsie]

This is a good thread. Water glassing eggs can be a handy thing.

 

[Eli]

We've had hens before and we're not allowed a rooster. So we didn't have to worry about if the eggs were fertilized or not. Ideally we'd like the rooster to be with the hens for some level of protection (or at least alarm) but also for chick's. Holding these up to a light seems not so reliable for identifying a new egg as fertilized or not. I'm sure we would just get better at it as time goes on?! But do you separate out a group of hens or anything like that? I'd like a steady SMALL stream of younger hens that lay some even in the winter.

I just keep chickens, too. Usually have too many eggs.

 

[Peanut]

@Eli Winter eggs are an iffy thing... egg production goes down with short days. Lights can help but they still slow. My hens tend to molt in late fall. They don't lay while molting either. So this year I got no eggs in Nov, Dec and most of Jan.

 

[Eli]

We've had hens before and we're not allowed a rooster. So we didn't have to worry about if the eggs were fertilized or not. Ideally we'd like the rooster to be with the hens for some level of protection (or at least alarm) but also for chick's. Holding these up to a light seems not so reliable for identifying a new egg as fertilized or not. I'm sure we would just get better at it as time goes on?! But do you separate out a group of hens or anything like that? I'd like a steady SMALL stream of younger hens that lay some even in the winter.

Sorry off topic a bit.

 

[Terri9630]

We've had hens before and we're not allowed a rooster. So we didn't have to worry about if the eggs were fertilized or not. Ideally we'd like the rooster to be with the hens for some level of protection (or at least alarm) but also for chick's. Holding these up to a light seems not so reliable for identifying a new egg as fertilized or not. I'm sure we would just get better at it as time goes on?! But do you separate out a group of hens or anything like that? I'd like a steady SMALL stream of younger hens that lay some even in the winter.

Candling an egg doesn't work until the chick starts to form. When we get ready to incubate eggs we collect the eggs for a couple of days and then add them all to the incubator. You'll have a mix of fertile and not fertile eggs depending on several things. For example, I have a hen that doesn't like our current roosters so she won't let them mount but shes a good layer so she stays.

 

[Amish Heart]

I just fill the incubator. I don't bother candling. We have a small incubator, holds under 25 chicken eggs at a time. I just had 17 hatch, and the weather's been cold, so that's not a terrible hatch rate, and I'm not worrying about what's fertile or not. I do check egg shell quality when I put them in. If they're off shape, or too much poop on them (don't wash the eggs) or if the shell looks bumpy or thin, I don't use those eggs.