Tips: Lime Preserving Eggs

Somewhere in my wanderings on the Internet in the last couple of years, I came across the idea of preserving fresh eggs in a solution of water and hydrated lime. I vaguely thought about doing it last year, but never did.

This year, however, I mentioned the idea to my friend who has many more chickens than I do, and from whom I get extra eggs in the spring. 

Pretty! And clean, which, as you'll see, is more important than pretty.

She had also heard of it and wanted to try it. So I did some online research, collected a bunch of eggs from her, and tried it.

And now I'm going to tell you all about it! Whee!

First, I have to say, because it bugs me that people seem to repeat this without doing any of their own investigations: Lime preservation of eggs is NOT the same as water glassing. Many online homestead-branded people seem to call lime preservation water glassing. They are not the same thing, although the process is similar. Water glassing eggs requires sodium silicate. Lime preserving eggs requires only hydrated lime.

I did lime preservation because we have a fifty-pound bag of hydrated lime in the barn already for A.'s masonry projects. 

Which brings me to the next point: What lime am I talking about?

Hydrated lime is also called pickling lime. If it's labeled this way, it's probably sold in much smaller quantities. At a building supply place like Home Depot, it would be labeled "hydrated lime" or "slaked lime." It's sold in much larger quantities when labeled this way, but all three are the same thing. It's a white powder that is mildly irritating to skin if you submerge your hands in it like A. does for masonry, but I never had a problem with the small quantities I was using.

That leads neatly to the next point: quantities.

The ratio repeated over and over online is one ounce of lime in one quart of water. But is it a liquid ounce, which would be two tablespoons? Or an ounce by weight, which is more like four tablespoons? I don't know. I saw somewhere (yes, this is very scientific) that two tablespoons is about right, so that's what I did. All I did was fill a half-gallon canning jar with two quarts of water and four tablespoons lime, put on the lid, and shake it up. Then I poured it over the eggs.

And about those eggs . . .

The eggs cannot be dirty in any way. BUT. They also can't be washed. I used only the eggs that came out very clean from the coops. This is why it was helpful to be getting extra eggs from the glut my friend had: I knew she hadn't washed them, and I could pick through them for the very cleanest ones.

They have to be put carefully in a non-reactive container. A lot of people recommend five-gallon buckets with lids. I don't. That's far too big to be practical. It gets much too heavy, and I would think the weight of the eggs on top might crack the ones on the bottom.

I used a smaller bucket with a lid that had held 12 pounds of honey, as well as some old commercial-sized sour cream containers with lids I got from the school cafeteria.

So! Really all it is is layering the eggs in the container and then pouring the water+lime until the eggs are completely submerged. I found that I needed to leave several inches of space--maybe four?-- over the last layer of eggs to have room for the water at the top to completely cover them.

Then I put the lids on, labeled them with the date, and stuck them under Poppy's small table in the corner of the dining room.

Along with some extra lemon juice, and Poppy's "Mary Poppins" bag. You'd have to ask her about that one.

All together, I put around six dozen eggs in those containers. And then I just left them there. I started using them around May, when I was no longer at school and getting eggs from my friend. (She works there, too, so once school was over, so was my easy egg supply.)

I am now using eggs that were put in those containers almost five months ago, and they are still perfectly fine. I do check each egg before I put it in anything. Cracking them into a separate bowl individually is the safest way to check them.

Quality check before making scrambled eggs.

To be honest, though, since the best way to check the eggs is to smell them, I usually just crack the egg and then sniff in the crack before I open them up. If the egg was rotten, I would know it immediately.

I did have one egg that seemed to kind of explode when I cracked it, like it was pressurized. Oddly, it had no off smell at all, but I still gave it to the dogs. Better safe than sorry, right?

The only difference between these eggs and fresh eggs that I can see is that these are more likely to spread in a pan, and the yolks are more likely to break when I crack the egg. I've used them for fried eggs, scrambled eggs, and in baking. I haven't tried hard-boiling them, just because I can't check them before I boil them.

All in all, I was very pleased with how well this worked, and will likely do it again next year. It's really nice having a supply of home eggs on hand when I don't have a glut of them. I haven't had to buy eggs from a store in months, and that's just the way I like it.