Preserve Your Eggs for Winter!

hey everybody this is Carolyn from homesteading family and I'm really excited to share this with you today we've been talking about eggs and egg season and what to do when you have too many eggs coming in in the spring now this method is very very very founded historically people use this all the time right up into the 40s and 50s because until that time in a lot of country areas out in the country in the United States we didn't have electricity and there wasn't refrigeration consistently and so people use this method all the time to keep their eggs this is called water glassing and there's several different methods to do it I'm going to show you the best method and the easiest method right here today now first of all let's talk about why do I want to preserve my eggs well in the wintertime chickens naturally stop laying as much or all together depending on where you live when the daylight hours go down and there's less sunshine less daylight hours then you're going to get less egg production now a lot of places and a lot of people tell you well go ahead and put artificial lighting in to make sure that you still keep your egg production up but you know here at our homestead we feel like if God created the chicken to stop laying eggs during the winter then make that best for their bodies and so we choose to go ahead and not give them supplemental lighting in the winter and let them just be chickens which means we don't get very many eggs and so we want to put some eggs aside for winter so we don't have to go buy somebody else's eggs somebody who did put supplemental lighting in that wouldn't make very much sense so this is a great way to save your eggs for baking and cooking all winter long now if you like now in the spring when there's this heavy flush of eggs and we have so many eggs to deal with and you know we don't really have any other harvesting or preserving to deal with right now there's no milk coming in yet that should happen in about a month here on our homestead and we don't have any vegetables coming in but a little bit of fresh eating vegetables we don't have anything else going on so this is a great time to focus on preserving your eggs now we are going to use hydrated lime this is also known by several different terms Slate's lines or pickling line that's right this is the same thing you get in those tiny little packages like mrs. wages pickling lime for really expensive well this is the exact same thing hydrated lime except for you buy 50 pounds of this at a time for about $10 at your local hardware store so we have to go a little bit further are really close this hardware store didn't carry this because it's kind of small and this is kind of more of a building specialty and so we had to go down to the local Home Depot which is a little further away for us and we got a 50-pound bag of hydrated lime for $11 now let me tell you 50 pounds of this is going to last me years I am going to have all the eggs that I need for years from that 50 pounds so this is a really economical way to save your a another really great benefit of using this hydrated lime is that you don't need to have any cold storage for your eggs you can do this just in room temperature and of course if you have a cooler part of your house you're going to want to keep them there just like all of your food storage you don't want to put it in the warmest part of the house you don't want to put it in anything that's getting direct sunlight that just deteriorates all food so that's kind of just a matter-of-fact about food preservation but for the most part you can stick these in a closet you can fit these anywhere and they'll last just fine now the noted percentage is success rate for this at 8 months is about 100% what does that mean it means your eggs are going to be great at about 8 months which is really you know eight months to a year that's as long as I'm wanting to get out of these eggs some people note that their eggs have been great really good quality eggs for up to two years with this method this is an amazing thing refrigeration know anything just a bucket and for a cross if you have it would be even better and some titrated ones and you're good to go on a now we need to talk about your eggs for a few minutes this is really important do not do this with store-bought eggs because they have been washed and so the pores are completely exposed and you will suck the line into your eggs and that will just be awful it won't be any good the eggs will go bad or they'll taste so bad you don't want to use them you want to use your current days fresh clean unwashed eggs so the great thing about this is I'm going to go ahead and make some up here to show you how to do it and then every day I'm just going to put any extra eggs that I have in it until the bucket is completely full and after that I'm going to actually fill another bucket because we have a big family we want a lot of eggs so I'm going to try to do about 3 of the 5 gallon buckets worth of eggs and honestly I can't tell you if I count how many that's going to be do you have any guesses I'd love to know what fits into a five-gallon bucket of eggs that's never counted so this is going to be a really good thing to do with your fresh unwashed a if you are buying them from a farmer please ask them and tell them directly I need unwashed eggs generally they will not wash them but if they get dirty eggs in their kitchen they may be washing them to get them clean so double check with your farmer because again it's just not worth it to do these with unwashed eggs alright so we have a bowl here are you getting pretty big up today's and yesterday's clean unwashed eggs I have about 8 quarts of water clean water in a very clean bucket and all freshly clean if you live on city water I would highly recommend that you use filtered water maybe even distilled water for this and I have 8 ounces of hydrated wine now you use about an ounce by weight an ounce by weight not an ounce is in a measurement a volume measurement you want to weight measurement out of hydrated lime per quart of water you can do these in all different sizes you could do these and a great big 10 gallon bucket if you had it you could do these in a little 1 gallon crock whatever you have is fine just use that same ratio of 1 quart of clean water to 1 ounce weight out of hydrated lime and this is how what you do this is okay I'm going to dump this right on in here this is it it is so simple it's just a really a shame that we don't do this very much anymore because this is so easy and I'm just going to mix this right on up I have a whisk here and I'm just whisking it around you can see it's turning kind of milky that'll is us going now what is hydrated lime anyways hydrated lime is oyster shells or phone or limestone that has been burnt in a kiln and then it has been hydrated with water that is what hydrated lime is so it's a very natural product it's not a chemical a synthetic chemical but this is going to be very different than the lime that you find in your agricultural or gardening section which is just ground up limestone so you don't really want to look there you want to look in your building supply section people use it for masonry work of some sort okay so we have this really well mixed and let me tell you that's it that's all that's all I have to do here this is room temperature water you don't want it hot you don't even need it cold I suppose you could use a cold but that's all there is to it now every day I'm going to go ahead and in my nice clean unwashed eggs now I know sometimes when you're getting your own eggs you end up with dirty eggs you know the hidden with the bathroom in the nest box or maybe it's a little muddy and the mud just kind of tracks around and gets on everything ducks my Ducks are notorious for that they're always there eggs are always coming in muddy and lucky and dirty and you know half the time they lay them out in the yard they don't even bother to go back to their nest boxes and so I'm going to show you something else to do with those because you really don't want to do this with those types of eggs if you're having that problem make sure that you're getting fresh smooth nesting material into your egg boxes every day if you need to at different seasons when it's muddy out we really need to do that around here and if you have a hen house that they have to walk through before they get to the nesting spot go ahead and make sure that the whole hen house has a nice fresh bedding down on the ground it kind of like that doormat rub them off before they actually get to the spot where they're going to win so if you're still having problems after that you may have to consider keeping your hands locked in during the morning hours until until they finished laying to keep them closer to home don't let them out quite so early you know I love seeing my chickens out in the yard hard for me to want to lock them in but you know just like I tell my children we have to work before we play so sometimes you have to tell the chickens best - okay well I'm loading this up there are a lot of eggs going in here I didn't count I was going to count them oh no I'm gonna have to go back and count them all because I want to know how many eggs fit in a five-gallon bucket if you know or you have a guest write it in the comments and let me know what you think I bet I can get a lot of eggs in a five-gallon bucket okay now here's one more thing that I want to share with you when you start getting to the point that you can start positioning the eggs because you have enough of them in there make sure that you're positioning them with the small side down and then true whether you're putting them in your egg carton or you're putting them here in your bucket or wherever you are and the reason for this is is that you have an air bubble an air pocket inside of every single egg and if you haven't going to the large section it actually has a little less surface area that it's touching the egg the rest of the egg white and everything and so you want to keep it like that so that it just doesn't get bigger it doesn't start sucking up the rest of the egg space which it will do it will start to decline your coin your quality so always store them with a small side down and the big side up if it's possible you know in this I have not read that it makes any difference at all in water glasses but you know it's a great kind of average thing to know about eggs okay and there you have it now when I want to use these eggs all I'm going to do is take them out of the water glass solutions just like this and I'm going to go ahead and rinse them off I just don't want that stuff getting into my food and then I'm ready to use them that's all there is to it the one major thing to look forward before in terms of problems with this is to make sure you don't have evaporation so even make sure you have a lid on here or if you don't have a lid you're using a crock or something I would put a nice layer of olive oil right over the top and then cover it with a clean cloth so you don't get any insects or anything in there just to avoid any evaporation and that's all there is to it it's that easy tomorrow I'm going to get more eggs and I'm going to put the clean ones right on top of this and if I start running out of solution I'll make a little bit more so same ratio and just pour it right on over right until the bucket is nice and full then I'm going to set it right back on the pantry shelves in a nice dark spot and I'll be able to eat eggs all winter long take care of you guys dry for more videos like these sign up at WWF it family calm also follow along on Facebook Instagram and YouTube [Music]

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 1,062,265

Rating: 4.8844352 out of 5

Keywords: water glass, preserve eggs, homesteading, eggs for winter, fresh eggs, chickens, raising chickens, storing eggs, too many eggs, homesteading family, homesteading skills, homesteading 101, homesteading off grid, off grid skills, preparedness, prepping, homesteading lifestyle, how to keep eggs fresh for a long time, preserving eggs in lime, historic food preservation, keep eggs fresh, keeping eggs, water glassing eggs, water-glassing eggs, preserving eggs, saving eggs

Id: bTlcCvvUjl0

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/maggzag]

Never heard of this, cool! Very informative video.