Egg Storage Question

[big brown horse]

Hi Dace!

Cullinary school? Very cool!

I just had 2 fresh eggs and they stood up like biscuits in the frying pan...barely any spread!

Loose eggs may be older, but I think they just loose that wonderful taste.

 

[patandchickens]

So help me to understand.....as I was taught in culinary school, the older an egg gets the more it spreads out when you crack it into a pan. With a fresh egg the yolk sits up high and the white stays tight around the yolk.

So old eggs are just loose, not really BAD?

Life cycle of a stored egg, as per my amateur experience:

For the first day or two, the white is oddly cloudy (cooks up ok tho); part of the white will be quite runny if you go to fry the egg, and part extra-gelatinous.

For the first week or so, the egg will not hardboil well (won't peel).

For the first week or two (depending on storage temperature) the yolk will stand up very high when fried.

As the egg ages it will resemble a store egg more and more, with runnier whites and a floppier more-fragile yolk.

After somewhere between a month and several months, depending on storage, both store-bought and home-laid eggs start to noticeably (to me) lose their good flavor. They are still perfectly fine for using in recipes but won't taste as yummy if fried, scrambled, that sort of thing where they're being used 'plain'. And they start to lose some of their ability for the whites to beat up well. They're not "bad" but they're definitely not good-quality, aesthetically, you know?

After somewhat longer than that, they start to get noticeably funny-tasting. At that point and beyond, it is personal choice when to call it "bad" and discard it. I have used home-laid eggs stored in the fridge for 2.5 months with no problem, and storeboughten eggs considerably older than that, but, you know, it depends. And when they get that old, you for sure want to be cooking them *thoroughly and hot* and probably breaking them separately rather than directly into a bowl, so you can intercept any especially-funny ones.

JME,

Pat

 

[dipence71]

Great thread!!! Always wondered about all that. My girls are {hopefully} going to start laying soon.