Let's Talk Egg Storage Options

One of my learning experiences with backyard chickens has been the challenge of egg storage. When I had four layers, it was fairly easy, but now I have seven and three more are almost there as well. I have also noticed this seems to be a hot topic with my fellow chicken keepers.

Here were my questions:

1. Do you refrigerate or store on the counter?

2. How do you know which ones are the most or least fresh?

3. How many eggs will I have at once?

Fairly simple.

In my case, I store in the fridge. Storing on the counter is just fine for eggs. My choice is personal and based on these three reasons: I have very little space in my kitchen and counter space is precious, I have two evil cats who think knocking things to the floor is entertaining, I do like the eggs lasting a little longer, although they seem to be gone much more quickly now.

I also mark each egg with a pencil or sharpie with the lay date. This is super handy and I feel more confident on the freshness of the eggs as a result. The small amount of eggs I get, this is not difficult.

So, far, the largest amount of eggs I've had in the fridge at one time was a little over 30. Not bad. I have a neighbor that buys two dozen at a time, so I can be wiped out quickly. If they have purchased recently and it starts to add up, I either post on Facebook that I have extras or make a delicious quiche for dinner. Either way, I have had no problems with eggs sitting around. 

However, I do have issues with storing them and keeping the dated ones together. Here were the dilemmas: I hate the door thingy that is supposed to hold eggs (horrible design), egg cartons are a pain and have to be removed each time I need an egg, egg flats are too fragile and wear out quickly. I wanted something easy to lay the eggs in and easy to grab one quickly, while keeping them in the fridge and the oldest eggs roll to the front so they're are the first to go.

Skelters are pretty popular, like this one on the left. But they are round and kind of tall, leaving them either taking up quite a bit counter space or not fitting in the fridge well. I'm also a sucker for symmetry. It just doesn't seem like the optimal design.

I found some designs that really seemed to fit what I need, but they are challenging to find in the US. Since we, as a nation, tend to refrigerate our eggs, people don't think about egg storage much.

So, I made my own. Necessity really is the mother of invention.

I wanted something that fit easily on a shelf in the fridge and was sloped enough the eggs would roll towards the front. It also needed to be not incredibly deep so I could reach into the back of it and place the newest eggs as I collected them. I went to Home Depot and walked around, staring at various sizes of wood and screws and nails, to see what might work. 

This is what I came up with:

I like it. It's pretty and the dark stain looks nice. It's clearly too small for the amount of eggs I get and plan to keep. It would be excellent for the single person who grabs the half a dozen eggs a week. I have one person who buys that many eggs at a time from me.

Also, the sides are too wide. I'm going to need multiple rows in the same unit and a 1" block of wood between them is a bit much. However, the slope is perfect and I really do love that stain.

Then I made this one:

I like it as well. The thinner sides are clearly much better and the blue paint is so fun. I can see people liking this one quite a bit. It's still too small for the amount of eggs I get and plan to keep. I went ahead and posted this on a Facebook group to get folks opinions and the chorus agreed; it's too small. I did realize that you can stack the eggs on top of other eggs here and it works nicely. The only issue is the eggs don't roll easily. 

So, then, I went all out and made this one:

This is the one. I really love it and I love this new choice of stain as well. I immediately put this one in my fridge and started using it. I grabbed a couple of pencils and put them in the left row (I constantly lose them)  and used it for the next week, with tremendous success. 

Here it is in my fridge:

Since i took this picture, I also slide empty egg cartons behind this so I can grab them  quickly when someone drops by to buy some eggs. There's the perfect amount of room.

I have tried a few variations, wider rows for larger eggs, but then the regular and smaller size eggs don't roll well. I also tried just having a larger bottom without the row dividers as a whole and nope, just didn't work as well as a whole. I think the wider rows is still a win, particularly if you're like me and you have a chicken that tends to only lay the big eggs, it would be handy. 

Here's a teal version of the wider rows. The large egg is 3 1/2" long and turned out to be a triple yolker (the only one I've ever seen). However, it's really for the larger eggs only. The smaller eggs didn't really work with the slope. 

So there we have it. I have made a few different models and added them to the shop to see which ones people prefer. I have sold one, the blue oneabove with the regular size rows. I haven't gotten feedback yet, but I'm crossing my fingers it was a win. No news is good news, right?

Meanwhile, the large one works for me so well. I'm still looking for ways to tweak it; I had one person suggest chalk paint on the front so you can write dates on for tracking egg freshness. I like that idea very much and think it's going to be my next experiment.

I'll let you know how it goes.

The Truth About Cooking Hard-Boiled Eggs

EDIT: 5/11/16  (see below)

I am terrible at peeling hard-boiled eggs. Truly. I always ruin a few so completely the whites are thrown back to the chickens in shame and the yolks are salvaged for the devilly part. As a result, I have spent several years pretending they don't exist. My kids and husband love them, but when they mention it, I just let my face go blank, in complete denial.

I've been a backyard chicken keeper for a year now and I've decided I can no longer pretend hard boiled eggs are a thing of the past. I follow various forums and Facebook groups about chickens and enjoy reading what folks share about their self-declared perfect way to make hard boiled eggs. This weekend, I had some extra eggs and I decided I would experiment with three separate ways of cooking them and see if any of them could work for me. I used all fresh eggs also, one was about a week old, but otherwise, the eggs were from that day or the couple of days before. Who wants to have to care about waiting two weeks, am I right?

1. Steaming: This is the method I hear my fellow chicken folks discussing the most. So, I started on the Incredible Egg site with a recipe called:Easy Peel Hard-Boiled eggs. I don't have a steamer I could place in the pot, so I grabbed some hardware cloth (because we all have tons of that lying around) and bent it so it could fit in the bottom of the pan, keeping the 4 eggs out of the water. I filled the large pan about 3/4" deep with water and turned on the heat to bring it to a boil before I placed the eggs. I made sure the water wasn't touching the eggs.

2. Boiling: Next up was the standard way I've been cooking eggs with an interesting twist. Marc wrote this glorious blog post on how to make the perfect hard-boiled eggs depending on how much you like them cooked as well as for ease of peeling. He cracks the shell before boiling (check out the picture to the right), just enough to keep the inner membrane intact. 

3. Last of this experiment was baking the eggs, according to this from Alton Brown. This was certainly the easiest method of the three recipes. I just popped the eggs in my fancy Pampered Chef muffin stoneware and stuck them on the center rack.

For my results, I'll start with my least favorite option, baking:

First of all, I love Alton Brown, but I'm not with him on this. This was by far the worst method, because the eggs weren't cooked through. As a result, the peels clung to the eggs like it was a love affair.

I have a fairly new oven that has not given me temperature issues previously and I waited for the pre-heating to complete before I popped them in to bake, but they simply weren't done. The egg whites were still runny (see the picture to the right). I was super disappointed, because this would have been such an easy approach.

My second favorite method was the boiling with the cracked shells. This was fine, as long as you aren't terrible at peeling eggs like I am. I followed the instructions in the recipe exactly, not adding salt or anything to the water.

I'm a little sad this one wasn't super helpful with peeling as I love the details he provides. Clearly a lot of love went into this post. Check out my horrible eggs on the left.

This method was clearly no different to me than my usual difficulties. I didn't find the crack in the egg before boiling was more helpful than cracking them afterwards.

But we have a winner, without doubt.Steaming! This method certainly made all the difference when peeling these eggs and they were cooked perfectly. I didn't have much of an issue peeling them at all, two of them even peeled about perfectly. I highly recommend using this method when making hard-boiled eggs and it's certainly going to be something I don't have to avoid anymore.

UPDATE: So one more thing to add to the peeling miracle. I read on one of the many chicken pages I go to of a woman who uses a spoon to slide under the membrane under the shell and pop the shell off. This is true and worked like a charm for me yesterday. Check out how amazing these eggs look.