Preserving Eggs

In the fall, when our girls had just started laying, it was all we could do to get enough eggs to not have to buy more.  Once they finally started to pick up the pace, the cold weather settled in and their laying stayed on at a very reasonable pace.  we only had 3 or 4 extra dozen eggs all winter long.  But our girls are young and now that the weather is steadily warm, it takes less than 2 days for them to put together a dozen eggs.  We are swimming in them.


The sign on the front porch helped for a few weeks, but we haven't had anyone buy eggs from us in weeks. You can only make and eat so many quiches and souffles before your head blows up!  I made my first successful mayonnaise (thank you Julia Child).  Gave a dozen or two away.  Still more eggs.

My first thought as to how to preserve eggs was to pickle them, but there are some drawbacks to that.  For one, you have to be really patient to let your eggs get old enough to hard boil well.  Also, while it was a practice of the past, canning pickled eggs is now considered an unsafe no-no.  Of course, you can still refrigerator pickle them, and they last for months that way.  I do plan on pickling eggs once I let some eggs get old enough for it.

Then I remembered the advice in some of my antique and vintage cookbooks about storing them in buckets of sawdust or Vaseline or slaked lime water.  It was VERY tempting, but I'd go out on a limb that it's even less safe than canned pickled eggs.

Final soloution: Freeze them!  No, I'd go out on a limb and say after freezing they probably won't make the best scrambled eggs, but in the dead of winter when I'm short one egg for a Christmas cookie, I bet I'll be glad I did this.  I think of it as my insurance against having to buy eggs during heavy baking season.

Step 1: Select Ice cube tray.  This may seem silly, but I quickly learned that the newer, skinny-style 16-cube trays don't fit an egg very evenly.  The older-style, more square cubed 12 cube trays fit on egg into 2 cubes.  That means one cube full of white and one with the yolk and any overflow white.

Step 2: Freeze 'til solid

Step 3: Do whatever voodoo that you do to get them outta the trays and into a bag in the freezer.  

When it comes time to use them, pluck out a white cube and a yellow cube an hour or so ahead of time for each egg called for.