Preserving Eggs

I found myself with more eggs than I could reasonably use.  These weren't our eggs from my girls, Hubby sells them at his work.  These were from my work.

I gave some away, I made pavlova and Bacon and Egg Pie.

Because the hens go off the lay for winter, I thought it would be nice to have some put away that I don't have to buy for those months.  I make jokes about my hens being free-loaders and I know that it doesn't help that most of my birds are older.  I'm working on that.  I have some new hens of different breeds, one of the girls came to me with the story about how she usually raises 4 clutches of chicks each year so I'm living in hope.  The barred rocks are supposed to be great mothers too.

I decided to try drying some.  This is something I've seen mentioned in various homesteading and self-sufficiency websites.  I found a recipe and instructions and gave it a go.

I beat up six eggs and that was all that would fit in my plastic tray for my dehydrator.  I thought I might try lining others with baking paper, but my baking paper wasn't quite wide enough and I didn't want to be cleaning egg off everything.

The page I was going off said to use your fruit and vegetable setting - about 135 degrees.  So I thought I might dry some in the oven too.  I've used my oven to dry other things and it's worked reasonably well before.

I'm rather disappointed in myself for the stupid rookie mistake I made with this.  I know that most recipes I find online are in Fahrenheit and I always make the effort to double check temperatures and convert to Celsius.  Well, except for this time.  I cooked the eggs in the oven.  They went rubbery and looked rather disgusting on the whole.  My pigs didn't mind the addition to their diet though.

Cooked eggs from the oven "drying" failure.

The ones from the dehydrator seemed to work.  I've put them through the food processor like the instructions said to powder them, but they didn't break down to powder, more like crumbs.  I think that may be because it's a big food processor and not a lot of dried egg.  I spent a little time grinding it up in a mortar and pestle, but sore arms came rather quickly from that.  I'm currently drying more and I think I'll process them all together in one bigger amount.

Dried Eggs from the dehydrator.

As an experiment, I tried reconstituting some of the egg as per these instructions.  It said 2 tablespoons of egg powder to 1 tablespoon of warm water.  Stir and leave for 5 minutes.  This is supposed to be equivalent to 1 egg. NOPE.  That wasn't right.  I think it's the other way around.  1 - 1 1/2 tablespoons of powder to twice the volume of warm water.  I say 1 - 1 1/2 because from six eggs I got approximately 9 tablespoons of powder.  I played with it a bit and got what looked a little like beaten egg after a while.

I posted about this on facebook and got a lot more suggestions.  One friend said she freezes them in ice cube trays and then pops them out into zip lock bags and keeps them in the freezer.  I looked at my ice cube trays (that come with F&P freezers) and thought that one cube would barely fit the yolk so instead I froze a dozen eggs in a muffin tray.  The problem came from trying to pop them out.  They were stuck!  I had to partially thaw them so they came out easily and then put them back into the freezer.  We'll see how well that works out at a later date.

Eggs in muffin tray for freezing.

Other suggestions that I haven't yet tried are isinglass and pickling.  I will look into them at a later date.