Episode 29 How to Freeze Chicken Eggs

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Preserving the Pantry. I'm so glad you're here with me today. I am gonna be talking about eggs today, chicken eggs, and the shortage of chicken eggs that we're having right now in the stores. I don't know if this is happening everywhere, and I honestly don't pay that close attention to it.

Most of the time we do have our own chickens and raise our own eggs, I mean, My blog is called Beyond the Chicken Coop. We do have chickens. We have several chickens, and most of the time we get anywhere between six and 18 eggs a day. That varies, but we get eggs every day. Very, very rarely have I had to buy eggs.

I've been raising chickens for almost 20 years, and in that time there's just a handful of times that I've bought eggs. Let's see, one time it was Easter and we wanted white eggs to dye, and so we bought a few dozen of white eggs at the grocery store for coloring those Easter eggs. One time all of a sudden my chickens just stopped laying and it was like in March.

So when it's a time of year where they should have been laying, but they just kind of all stopped and were going through a phase where they weren't. So I had to buy a few dozen for a couple of different weeks, and that's probably all that I really remember buying eggs in these past 20 years.

We do keep a chicken light on in our hand house. We have a very large chicken coop and we keep the light on in part of that chicken coop and part of the coop does not have a light.

Chickens need at least 14 hours of daylight in order to lay, and so if they're getting that daylight from a light, then they will also continue laying chickens ebb and flow with their cycle.

They go through a molting time where they're not laying, but we have several chickens, so we always have something that's laying. But recently I have really noticed the shortage in the stores. I walked into our grocery store the other day, big grocery store, and the whole section where the eggs are was empty.

There wasn't a single egg carton in the store. And it just stopped me in my tracks. I thought, whoa. What happened here? This was just last week, so we're talking the beginning of January. It's not like a time of year where people are buying eggs, but the shortage is there. The other thing I noticed is that often times there is a limit to the number of eggs you can buy.

It'll say two dozen per shopper or per family. And I thought, well, that was interesting too. And then I've noticed in several different Facebook groups, people have been posting pictures of the cost of eggs in their local market. The pictures that they were posting showed some eggs over $6 a dozen eggs, which is just seems astronomical.

So I decided I probably need to start paying attention to my eggs a little bit more and preserving my eggs so that I have them in case I need to buy them again or I run out. I'll still give them away to family and friends, but I'm gonna be a little more cautious with how many I give away. So I decided that I'm gonna start freezing my.

So I've been playing around with this for the last few weeks and really testings out different ways to freeze eggs, and then using those eggs in different recipes and giving that to see how they work and what I'm noticing. I'm going to share all the tips with you today. I also have a new post on my blog that I'll share a link to in the description of this podcast, but it lists all of what you need to do in order to freeze eggs.

Now, first of all, you cannot freeze a whole egg in the shell. If you've ever tried to raise chickens and you've gone through a really cold period where temperatures are way below zero, and you go out to get your eggs and they have frozen solid, you'll know exactly what I mean. What happens is the contents and the eggs expand as they freeze and it cracks the shell and the eggs are no longer good once you have the cracked shell. The quality of the egg itself changes when you freeze a whole egg just like that.

I have three different types of ways that I freeze eggs. The first is a whole egg that's been scrambled or mixed together so that the egg and the white are combined and that you can use once it's thawed. You can use it for scrambled eggs. You can add into any egg casseroles you can use in baking, like your chocolate chip cookies or any cakes.

The second method is by freezing just the egg whites and I have separated my eggs, frozen, just the egg whites. When I thawed those, I did whip them together like I would if I was making a meringue and those egg whites fluffed up and became nice and stiff just like a fresh egg.

And the last method is by freezing just the egg yolks. And you do have to do something with the egg yolks to freeze those. You have to add something to the egg yolks to stabilize them, otherwise become very gelatinous and they almost, it becomes a very strange consistency and it's not usable anymore.

So I'll talk about what you need to add to those in just. I also tried to freeze a whole egg without mixing it up. So I took some eggs and I put them into a muffin tin and just put that whole egg right in there. And once they were totally frozen, I took them out of the muffin tin and then froze them in a zip top bag.

It all looked good until I went to try them and I took some out of the freezer, let them thaw, and tried to fry up those eggs. They looked great. I thought, wow, we are onto something here. But I have to tell you, this method did not work, so I did this experimenting for you so you don't have to waste your eggs, but the egg white itself was perfect.

It cooked up and it all looked good. The egg yolk is what became so weird. It was the strangest texture. Ever. So if you poked your finger into it, it didn't run. It was like poking your finger into a really soft gummy bear. Your finger went in and it left an indentation in it, and it was just the weirdest consistency ever.

So freezing a whole egg is does not work. I would not try that if I were you. I didn't try to eat the egg because I just couldn't get past that texture.

So let's talk about the first method. First, you're gonna take a whole egg and you're going to lightly scramble that together. You do need to combine the egg white and the egg yolk.

However, you don't want to get a whole lot of air into it. So usually when I scramble at egg eggs at home, I use a whisk or a fork, and I really just beat those together so they get nice and foamy, and you want to avoid that. You don't wanna incorporate the. Into the eggs at this time, but you do want the white and the yolk combined, so it's kind of a gentle stirring that you're getting together.

You can freeze those eggs just like that, but I found it a little bit better. I like the consistency a little bit better if. , I added just a touch of salt. So for mine, when I was doing the eggs, I froze four eggs together at one time. Lightly mix those together, and I added about an eighth of a teaspoon of salt and then mixed that back together when the eggs were thaw.

And then I tried to scramble them. They resembled a texture most like from the fresh eggs. And I think that has something to do with when you're scrambling those eggs together, you always have a little bit of the yolk that doesn't get fully mixed in and the salt kind of stabilizes that, uh, yolk part that's not mixed in and keeps it a very nice texture.

When I am doing those eggs, I will either freeze two eggs together or four eggs together, and I do that because those are the portions that I will most likely use when, and I can pull out. If I want more eggs, like for an egg casserole, I can pull out a couple of different batches of them and put them together.

So I have a. Eight or 12 eggs that I might need for a recipe. But if I'm doing two eggs well I might need that for chocolate chip cookies or some of the cakes that I make. And oftentimes if I just want breakfast for myself, it's going to be two eggs. So I've done that, but also four eggs worked really well for me.

So what I do is I take one egg at a time and put it in a small bowl and I inspect that egg. If you've ever been around farm fresh eggs, sometimes you will get the oddball egg that has gone. .So I don't want that egg, that bad egg to ruin the rest of my eggs in the bowl. So I crack them open one at a time into a small bowl and then pour them into a bigger bowl doing two to four eggs for me.

But do what works for you and then I lightly scramble them up. Add that pinch of salt, scramble them again, and I pour them into a freezer safe container. Now for me, what I do is I'll mix up, oh gosh, you can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 containers, whatever you have available. I put them those little containers onto a cookie sheet.

You can keep those right into that container, but I like to take them out of the freezer and take them out of the container and then into a zip top freezer bag. I like to do that. I need those containers for something else to get them out of the containers. I let them thaw just slightly, and oftentimes I will dip the bottom of that plastic container into hot tap water just to thaw just the outside so that when I turn it upside down and tap hard on my cookie sheet, it'll pop right out.

And then I just put those right into the zip top freezer bag and put those in the freezer. When I am labeling my freezer bag, I put that these are scrambled eggs, how many eggs I have, so it's either two eggs or four eggs for me, and I keep those in separate bags, and I put that I have added salt to this recipe.

That's really important, especially when you're going to be using this in baking. You're gonna want to adjust the amount of salt that you're putting in your recipe. . The next method that I've used is to use freezing the egg whites. So what I have done is, and actually I freeze both the eggs, whites and the egg yolks at the same time, but in separate containers.

But this would work really well if you're making something like, uh, a lemon curd and you had. You use just the egg yolks and you have the egg whites left and you weren't ready to use them. Now you can freeze those. So what I do is I carefully separate my eggs into separate containers, and with the egg whites, I will freeze anywhere between four and six egg whites.

Again, those are some of the recipes that I use. That's what I will need, and I put those in the same small little containers and I put them in the freezer and. And when they're done, I take them out, let them thaw briefly, knock 'em out of that container and put 'em in a zip top bag, making certain that I label what it is with the egg yolks.

Again, I put anywhere 2, 4, 6 egg yolks in a at a time. I take my fork and I really need to make those yolks so that they're very well combined. And with this, I need to add either salt or sugar to stabilize those egg yo. For the egg yolks. If I'm going to use salt, I will use that. If I'm gonna be using something, a savory type of dish, a recipe that I'm going to be using in a savory manner, if I'm going to use sugar, I will be using it in something that I would, um, in the final result would be a sweet manner.

If I'm doing six egg yolks together, I will need one teaspoon of. Or a half a teaspoon of salt and mix those in together. Again, you're going to want to freeze these and make certain that you label the amount of egg yolks that you have in there, and whether you've added sugar or salt. And on that container I would put exactly how much sugar or salt you have put in there.

It's gonna really make a difference, especially if you're baking that you know what you've put. I did use these egg yolks and I, the first time just made, um, with salt, put the half a teaspoon of salt in there and then I made lemon curd and I then followed the recipe but omitted the excess salt that I would be adding in there.

And it still turned out really good. I have not made the lemon curd with the sugar, but I think it would even be more delicious. So there's three main ways, again, for you to freeze your fresh eggs. You can scramble those whole eggs together and. You can separate the eggs and the yolks and then freeze those separately as well.

I plan on doing this whenever I have a few extra eggs when I pull them in and just doing small batches as we go along and continue to add those to my my freezer and so that I have them whenever I need them. You do want to try to use your frozen eggs within a year after freezing them, but what a great way to.

If you don't have chickens yet, you probably either wanna find a source for fresh farm eggs if you want to freeze them, or start planning now of how can you raise your own chickens, and spring is a great time to do that. So start planning now. Let me know if you have any questions or if this works well for you.

Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you again next time in the pantry. Bye.

Thanks for listening, and be sure to tune in again next week for more episodes of Preserving the Pantry.