Water Glassing Eggs or Brining Eggs

The virus has a lot of things shut down, but guess what?  Nature, designed by our Creator, moves forward.  As springtime bursts forth, we see blooms on flowers and trees, we see bright, green growth on all the plants.  One other thing we see is the egg production from our hens really picks up.  We hear the song coming from the hen house as the hens fill the egg boxes with fresh, spring eggs.  We pick up the eggs, bring them inside, and package them up either to be consumed by us, sold, or given away.

Sometimes we have more than we can store.  One thing that Tricia found is an old-fashioned means of storing eggs developed in the 1800s.  The process is explained in Carla Emery's "Encyclopedia of Country Living" or any other number of places that you can find on the Internet.  This means of egg preservation was devised specifically for this "problem" we have of having too many eggs.  It is called Water Glassing Eggs or Brining Eggs.

The first thing we did is pour 8 quarts of filtered water into a five gallon bucket.  We cleaned out the bucket very, very well.

Then we take hydrated lime (also called slaked lime) and pour it into the water.  Hydrated lime can be found at any hardware store.  The ratio you want to use is 1 ounce by weight of hydrated lime to 1 quart of water.  So we used 8 ounces, by weight, of lime to 8 quarts of filtered water.

We poured it in...

And stirred...

One thing that you want to be careful of is to use clean, unwashed eggs.  Many times we collect eggs, they'll have mud on them.  Or worse, they'll have some chicken poop.  In these instances, we'll wash the eggs.  To preserve eggs by water-glassing or brining, you don't want to use eggs you've washed.  So for the days we collected, we separated the eggs into two containers - one of washed eggs and one of clean, unwashed eggs.  We collected them like this for several days.

Each night we'd gently put the eggs into the lime-water solution, dipping them down and positioning them under the water.  We tried our best to put them "pointy-side" down.

Once we were done, we stored a little over 100 eggs this way, put a lid on the bucket and we'll store in a cool, dark place.

Here is the crazy thing: eggs stored like this will keep for up to two years.  A video Tricia watched showed someone cracking them open after 8 months, and they looked great.  They just advise to rinse off the lime before using.  This fall, when egg production drops, we'll crack one of these eggs side by side with a fresh one and give it the "eye test," the "smell test," and then the "taste test."  Stand by for that update later on this year.