An egg is at its best quality the moment it is laid, after which its quality gradually declines. Properly collecting and storing eggs slows that decline. Egg Aging: An egg stored at room temperature ages more in 1 day than an egg stored in the refrigerator ages in 1 week. Collect eggs often so they won’t get dirty or cracked. Pullets sometimes lay their first few eggs on the floor. A floor egg is usually soiled and sometimes gets trampled and cracked. Well-managed pullets soon figure out what the nests are for. If they continue laying on the floor, perhaps not enough nests are available for the number of pullets in the flock. Eggs also get dirty when a hen with soiled or muddy feet enters the nest. Eggs crack when two hens try to lay in the same nest or when a hen accidentally kicks an egg as she leaves the nest. The more often you collect eggs, the less chance they will get dirty or cracked. Frequent collection keeps eggs from starting to spoil in warm weather and from freezing in cold weather. Try to collect eggs at least twice a day. Since most eggs are laid in the morning, around noon is a good time for your first collection. Discard eggs with dirty or cracked shells, which may contain harmful bacteria. If you are going to sell or hatch your eggs, sort out any that are larger or smaller than the rest or have weird shapes or wrinkled shells. You can keep the oddballs for your own culinary use. (And by the way, it’s normal to occasionally find an extremely small egg with no yolk or an extra-large egg with more than one yolk.) Store eggs in clean cartons, large end up so the yolk remains centered within the white. Where you store your eggs depends on whether they will be used for eating or hatching. If you plan to hatch them, store them in a cool, dry place, but not in the refrigerator. If you plan to eat them or sell them for eating, store them in the refrigerator as soon as possible after they are laid. The egg rack on a refrigerator door is not a good place to store eggs. Every time you open the refrigerator, eggs on the door get blasted with warm air. When you shut the door, the eggs get jarred. The best place to keep eggs is on the lowest shelf of the refrigerator, where the temperature is coldest. Raw eggs in a carton on the lowest shelf keep well for 4 weeks. Determining Freshness Sometimes you’ll find eggs in a place you haven’t looked before, so you can’t tell how long they’ve been there. One way to determine whether an egg is fresh is to put it in cold water. A fresh egg sinks, because it contains little air. As time goes by, moisture evaporates through the shell, creating an air space at the large end of the egg. The older the egg, the larger the air space. If the air space is big enough to make the egg float, the egg is too old to eat. NUTRITIONAL VALUE Eggs have been called the perfect food. One egg contains almost all the nutrients necessary for life. The only essential nutrient it lacks is vitamin C. Most of an egg’s fat, and all the cholesterol, is in the yolk. To reduce the cholesterol in an egg recipe, such as scrambled eggs or omelettes, use 2 egg whites instead of 1 whole egg for half the eggs in the recipe. If the recipe calls for 4 eggs, for example, use 2 whole eggs plus 4 egg whites. To eliminate cholesterol in a recipe for cakes, cookies, or muffins, substitute 2 egg whites and 1 teaspoon of vegetable oil for each whole egg in the recipe. In a recipe calling for 2 eggs, for example, use 2 egg whites plus 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil. If the recipe already has oil in it, you may omit the extra 2 teaspoons. biyb_1-39.jpg Print this gauge, paste it onto a piece of cardboard, and use it as a guide when candling an egg to determine freshness. Remember: In a fresh egg, the air space is no more than 1/8” deep. Another way to tell if an egg is fresh is to use a light to examine the air space, the yolk, and the white. This examination is called candling, since it was once done by using candles. These days an electric light is used, but the process is still called candling. A good penlight is ideal for candling. Candle eggs in a darkroom. Grasp each egg by its small end and hold it at a slant, large end against the light, so you can see its contents through the shell. In a fresh egg, the air space is no more than 1/8” deep. The yolk is a barely visible shadow that hardly moves when you give the egg a quick twist. In an old or stale egg, the air space is large and sometimes irregular in shape, and the yolk is a plainly visible shadow that moves freely when you give the egg a twist. Occasionally, you may see a small, dark spot near the yolk or floating in the white. This spot is a bit of blood or flesh that got into the egg while it was being formed. Even though blood spots and meat spots are harmless, when you sort eggs for hatching or for sale, eliminate those with spots. Customers don’t find them appetizing, and eggs with spots may hatch into pullets that lay eggs with spots. If you aren’t sure what you are seeing when you candle an egg, break the egg into a dish and examine it. Soon you will be able to correlate what you see through the shell with what you see in the dish. When you break a fresh egg into a dish, the white is compact and firmly holds up the yolk. In an aging egg, the white is runny and the yolk flattens out. Try com paring one of your homegrown eggs with a store-bought egg — it’s easy to tell which is fresher. biyb_1-39-2.jpg old egg floats; fresh egg sinks Shell Color A hen’s eggs have a specific shell color. All her eggs might be white, light brown, dark brown, speckled, blue, or green. The color of the shell has nothing to do with the nutritional value of the contents. Hens of the Mediterranean breeds lay white-shelled eggs. Since Mediterraneans are the most efficient layers, they are preferred by commercial egg producers. Many consumers prefer eggs with white shells because that’s what they’re used to seeing. Brown eggs are laid by American breeds. Since the Americans are dual purpose, they’re popular in backyard flocks. Some consumers prefer brown eggs because they look homegrown. Brown eggs come in every shade from a dark red dish color to a light tan that appears almost pink. Blue-shelled eggs are laid by a South American breed called Araucana and its relative, the Ameraucana. Because the eggs are so pretty, these breeds are sometimes called “Easter-egg chickens.” Green-shelled eggs are laid by hens bred from a cross between Araucana and a brown-egg breed. Unscrupulous sellers charge outrageous prices for blue or green eggs by falsely claiming that they’re lower in cholesterol than white or brown eggs. Hard-Cooked Eggs Hard-cooked eggs are often called “hard-boiled,” even though they shouldn’t be boiled at all. This is the one dish for which you don’t want to use fresh eggs. The con tents of a fresh egg fill up the shell, making the shell difficult to peel. After some of the moisture evaporates from an egg, the contents shrink away from the shell. An egg that’s I week old before being hard-cooked will be easier to peel. The proper way to hard-cook eggs is to place cold eggs in a saucepan, cover them with cold water, bring the water to a boil, and turn off the heat. Cover the pan and leave the eggs in the hot water for 10 minutes. Remove the eggs from the hot water after 10 minutes and cool them quickly in ice water or under cold running water, to keep the yolks from turning green. A green yolk is safe to eat, but it doesn’t look appetizing. Cooked eggs keep well in the refrigerator for 1 week. Next: Managing Breeders |