Here is a interesting article on
preserving eggs I thought you might enjoy reading followed by a few comments on MrsMac and I preserving eggs.
Although I have not tried this but probably will this winter, I have tried two other ways of preserving eggs for a short time, e.g 1-3 months.
JohnyMac Version I:
When living on our sail boat
Mad Max we use to preserve eggs for months by doing the following...
> Buying unwashed and unrefrigerated eggs. We did this by contacting the egg producer ahead of time and asking
them to set aside the qty we want.
> Once we picked up the eggs, MrsMac or I would cover them with petroleum jelly and put them back into a card board
egg carton with one side marked with the number 0 and the other side marked with the number 1. Then we would
put them on a fiddled shelf set aside for that purpose.
> When we got up in the morning one of us would flip the egg carton over to the other side. We knew if we missed a
day because the number 0 represented a even number while the 1 number represented a odd number and
corresponded to a even or odd day on the calendar.
> We always opened the egg into a separate container before we used it to make sure it was good. To be frank though,
I can not remember ever having a bad egg. In older eggs the yoke wouldn't hold firm but was great for cakes,
muffins or scrambled eggs. I just asked MrsMac how long we would keep our petroleum smeared eggs and she said,
"Oh I don't know...Up to two months or so."
Up at the cabin in the winter we keep and use eggs that are easily a month plus old. This is all we do.
JohnyMac Version II:
> Starting in October (Chickens lay less & less eggs as the days shorten) we ask our neighbor who has 20+ chickens
to save a few every day for us. Please do not refrigerate them or clean them.
> About once a week she will give us a dozen eggs stored in cardboard egg cartons. Again I mark each carton with a
number 0 or 1 as outlined above. We also put the date the eggs were bought/given to us on the carton.
> We stick the egg cartons in a dark corner of our root cellar. Each day we go down to our root cellar we turn all of the
boxes over. Typically we will have 6-7 dozen by the time the hens stop laying by Thanksgiving.
> When needed we use the oldest first. like the earlier version we break an egg into a separate container before using it
to fry up or mix in some batter. Again, I can not remember ever having a bad egg.
As a sidebar, our root cellar is the basement to the cabin. In the summer the temperature in the basement hovers around 65 degrees Fahrenheit. As a matter of fact, typically in August when the heat and humidity is at it's height; at night we open a window or two in the basement, leave open the door to the basement and open the three skylights. This seems to drop the temperature in the cabin by sun-up the next day to about 65 degrees. We then close all the windows, skylights and the basement door before our first up of coffee.
The whole cabin then typically stays at about 10 degrees cooler than outside through-out the day. When at night we start the process all over again.
Starting in mid October our basement's temperature starts to decline on it's own. I help it along by leaving the cellar windows open at night and then closing them upon getting up in the morning. The goal is to have the cellar maintain a temperature of 38 - 45 degrees Fahrenheit range from about the beginning of November till April or so.
That temperature range seems to be perfect for keeping our potatoes, apples and other root veggies from spoiling. It also seems to be a good temperature for leaving out recently defrosted food like the Thanksgiving turkey.
Have fun...
