IN THE KITCHEN
How long CAN you store your eggs?
I
f you've ever kept a flock
of chickens, you're
probably aware of a basic
perversity of smallholder life:
although your family's
consumption of eggs tends to
remain fairly constant year
round, your hens' production
of the delicious edibles
doesn't.
An experiment was carried
out in the United States to
establish which is the best
method of storing eggs, so
that they are still usable
months down the line.
Researchers bought 30 dozen
guaranteed fresh, washed,
uniform-sized supermarket
eggs from a wholesaler and
they also collected another 30
dozen fresh, unwashed, nonuniform, plot-type, fertile,
non-supermarket eggs.
They began by dividing their
60 dozen eggs right down the
middle, with 30 dozen fertile
US researchers find Grandma!s methods
worked quite well, but the refrigerator
gives you seven months! storage, or more!
eggs on one side and 30
dozen unfertile eggs on the
other.
Each set of 360 eggs was then
further divided into ten
separate batches of three
dozen each:
[1] a control group that was
left sitting out at room
temperature,
[2] a batch that was kept
under "controlled refrigeration" . . . that is, 36 eggs
which were put into an
airtight container and stored
o
o
at between 2 C and 4 C ,
[3] a group that was completely covered by a solution
of nine parts water and one
part sodium silicate, also
known as "waterglass",
[4] a group that w