3 Ways to preserve eggs for food storage

we can see here is a bit of a fight the nest box the cream leg bar the gray girl on the left is disputing the buff Orpingtons right to sit there the buff Orpingtons gone broody she wants to hatch some eggs and when she's broody when she's raising those chicks she won't lay any eggs so what we do is preserve eggs in times of Plenty to get us through when the hens are brooding or when the hens are molting and eggs are false gossip today we're going to show you three ways to preserve eggs [Music] hello welcome to English country life welcome to the chicken enclosure on a beautiful March day and welcome to preserving eggs we've done this video in part because Fiona and I had a conversation with someone recently he was almost dumbfounded of the idea of preserving eggs but it's very traditional it's been done for hundreds of years so we promised to do a video where we showed a variety of techniques now we do that because we raise hands and the Buffalo Fenton's will brood I sit on eggs for three weeks and they will then raise those chicks for six to nine weeks or even longer in that period those hens will not lay an egg there's also another period later in the year where those hens are molting they will go off lakes they use all the protein they can get to build new feathers so there are long periods with traditional breeds where you don't have many eggs so we've developed techniques to preserve the eggs in times of Plenty so that we have eggs well there's less available today we're going to show you three of those techniques we're going to show you drying eggs don't confuse it with those horrible things from World War two you may have heard of really good quality modern dried eggs are delightful we're going to show you freezing eggs which is a great technique and accessible to anyone with a freezer and we're going to show you preserving eggs in water glass which is a traditional technique and water glass is the old name for sodium silicate each method has its pros and cons and we can talk about those a little bit at the end but they're all good methods they just lend themselves to different uses at the end so let's take a look [Music] to freeze eggs you need something to freeze the men and I find silicon mini muffin trays ideal they're really flexible you can turn things out easily and the holes are more or less the right size for one large egg the problem you do have is they're really flexible so when full it's easy to spin everything when you take it to the freezer so put them on a baking tray before you start to prepare the eggs for freezing I crack them in turn to a brass check check to make sure there's no shelling them the eggs in good condition and then add them to a blender a dozen eggs is enough to fill that tray and all I'm gonna do is blend them so the whites videos really mix just for a few seconds I try not to fill each cell of the dredge the very top because if I do I'll inevitably spill some on the way to the freezer I'll freeze those flats on the tray overnight there we are the next day and you can see how easily the eggs turn out from the silicon mouth the light layer is just a phone where the eggs been beaten in the blender we store the eggs flesh will be for to time into a freezer bag when we do that we put two in the bottom then we roll the back and put in the melons in that way they don't all stick together in the bag and we can take out just a couple when we need them from the freezer don't throw the eggshells away we've got a use for them I'll show you that later [Music] the process for dried eggs is similar at the beginning to the process for frozen eggs crack each egg into a jug check that there's no shell in it and there's no problems with the egg and then pop it into a blender to whizz up into a smooth liquid in our blender you can be two dozen eggs at a time but I do find if you try and put more than aim at a fast speed they try and escape through the later next step in the process is to scramble the eggs once they're been blended use a nonstick pan because you don't want to use any oil or fat because that could go rancid when you store the pattern a and then we put in a very thin layer at a time because ultimately we're going to dry and then powder these eggs so you don't want great thick lumps of egg that's hard to dry and break up later one thing you will need to do is keep moving the egg around because there's no fat in the pan it will tend to stick and burn so it's very sensible to take a nonmetallic spatula and just keep the egg moving until it goes nice and solid and thoroughly cooked you're gonna have to do it in batches so get a bigger bowl already and each time that you've scrambled one set of egg pour it into the bowl and let it cool spread your cooled scrambled egg out on dehydrator tray so I can get a dozen eggs on every tray of this dehydrator so over a hundred in total if I've got enough eggs that I need to preserve once I've set up all I need 1700 to about 60 centigrade hundred and 40 Fahrenheit and generally I find I need about 18 hours of drying time you'll know when the eggs are dry because they wanted to be crisp and hard and if you just handle them and drop them you can hear how dry those eggs are here again you can look here and dry those egg pieces are what I'm doing is just popping them into a cutter grinder and I'm going to use that coffee in a spice grinder and wisdom up you reduce them to a fine powder I find do it little pulses is better if you're doing that overheat or burn out the motor now once you go into a fine powder what I like to do is pour them through a fine flour sip because there always be a few little hard pieces a few little lumps that are left in the bottom of the grinder that haven't ground up and all I do is pop these larger pieces back in the grinder and I'll grind them again with the next batch of egg that I put in what's up specifically or the tend to use is Jam funnel just pour a powdered sift egg into an airtight jar doesn't need to be anything fancy and a whole jam jar is perfectly adequate and that's it in those two jars are two dozen eggs and they're shelf stable for at least two years to use them and a little bit of water blend carefully to a thick paste and then dilute it slowly until we get to the consistency of beaten egg [Music] the next process we want to show you is preserving eggs in water glass you need a large jar to do this probably at least two liters if not larger in size and you need to be able to get your hand inside the neck in order to do that because you have to place the eggs in not drop them in you're also going to need some sodium silicate which is tend to be what we call water glass nowadays it's used for a number of purposes including sealing concrete fairly widely available but obviously get a good grade we're going to dilute that so you're gonna need a measuring jug and you're gonna need some clean fresh tap water to dilute it down you can see here how this Joe is only just enough to allow me to get my hand in and out of the jar so bigger jar with a wider mouth even better but obviously you need more eggs to fill it you can see I'm laying the eggs on this side some people will tell you the eggs need to be pointy end damage is important if you're subsequently going to set eggs for you to bation but for preservation purposes by the science of how this works with water glass provided they are unwashed clean and uncracked these eggs will be absolutely fine in the first layer you can see between each egg there are almost sort of little hollows and what I've tried to do is sit the second layer of eggs into those hollow so the eggs lock together the one thing with desperate to avoid here is any egg becoming cracked because it will then allow water glass into the egg but also egg into the water glass and water glass has an antibacterial quality that keeps the eggs fresh but if you pollute that with egg clearly you're compromising the whole jar eventually you'll have filled your jar completely to the top one of the advantages of having a jar that narrows into its neck is that you can lock the final layer of eggs under the shoulder of the jar and prevent one sort of bobbing to the surface in the neck of the jar next job is to mix up the water glass I reckon about a third to half the volume if you jar is the right amount of water glass provided you've locked your eggs together tight so I'm using 700 milliliters of clean fresh water to which I will add 100 milliliters of sodium silicate water glass of 800 milliliters in total which should be enough to fully surround all the eggs in my jar once you've added the two liquids to each other it's worthwhile giving them the good stone you can see that the water glass in the water gives us slightly sort of hazy appearance slightly shimmery appearance once you mix them well that will disappear carefully fill your jar with the mixed solution and ensure that the jar is filled through well above the level of the eggs it is important with water glass that the eggs stay below the surface so in this jar to juggle 'its you can see the liquids there you can see that the eggs are locked under the shoulders if you haven't got that tight pop something like a saucer on top to make sure they're submerged and store these in a cool dark place like a cellar for up to six months [Music] I'm preserving all those eggs means you end up with a lot of eggshells we have a useful what's your hope before we try and use them again is to sterilize them the easiest way we find of doing that put them in a baking tray in medium oven now this is not something I would suggest doing on its own so just do it when they open taught anyway we're fortunate because the SC's alleged movements come after a couple of hours and remaining bits of egg in those shells has been cooked off and have a listen the shells are so hot they're clicking so they've been thoroughly sterilized and we'll set them to cool having filled the eggs i want to grind them to a powder so I crush them in the hand first and drop the roughly crushed pieces into the same grinder that we use for grinding the dried egg all it takes really is equipment whizzed up in that grounder to get those eggshells to a powder unfortunately this grinder isn't completely airtight you do get some fine dust escaping from there but there's nothing to worry about it's basically a fine powder and we're going to store that powder because we can use that instead of things like oyster shell to feed back to the chickens so we'll tip that into a jam jar you'll get an awful lot of eggshells into one jam jar probably somewhere around about a hundred but if we include that in the chickens mash their own recognizers X because you don't want to encourage egg packing from chickens what it does do is give them all the nutrients the calcium carbonate and other things they need to make really strong eggshells well that was egged preserving which method do is we use all of them at different times I find that freezing eggs is great it's quick it's convenient you can do it with a minimum of kitten fuss but it doesn't mean that what you start with is effectively beaten egg so great for scramble great for an omelet great the cake making clearly let's go if you want to Friday it's all about drying eggs well probably a little bit less convenient to use than the frozen egg but lasts almost forever I mean years rich in a couple of years no problem at all brilliantly light so you can take them camping or backpacking or all of those kind of things they are very compact so they take up very little space in your larder so if you're in a small flat dried egg really useful that's for eggs in water glass well you have to buy some sodium silicate but it's not expensive to get small amount of that you get whole egg at the end of it so you can have a fried egg if you want to the choice is yours but the yolks can go a little bit runny after a few months and it can be a little bit of a faff to make them out and of course storage space they take a lot of space years gone by people would have stored them in a big enamel bucket in their pantry but if you're tight for space it may not be the method for you you enjoying this kind of content can you spare us five seconds give us a thumbs up down below and please leave us a comment if there's any other kinds of food storage you'd like to see do that snow we will be doing a lot more videos over the coming weeks we're certainly going to cover a lot more on things like soap making we've been asked to cover things like dish soap and laundry soap and we're certainly going to get to that and if you'd like to see those videos coming up hit the subscribe button down there and the bell next to it and you'll hear every time we upload a new video but whatever you do stay safe come back and searcing take care [Music]

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 28,355

Rating: 4.9788585 out of 5

Keywords: Waterglass, Water Glass, Drying eggs, Dehydrating Eggs, Freezing Eggs, Freeze Eggs, Food Storage, Food Preservation, Prepper, Survival, Smallholding, Smallholder, Food shortage

Id: qHburN5ARdA

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020