A Treatise on Eggs

I had intended tonight to make the Motherload of Zuchini Bread, but as I was shredding my 8 cups of zuke (out of only two squash, mind you), it dawned on me that I wanted to bake them in those little disposable aluminum pans which I haven't yet purchased.  I want to do this because I intend to mail a couple of these puppies and freeze the rest and figure the pans will help support the breads, particularly in the mail.  So no aluminum pans on hand, but I figured I could just line my regular pans in foil and just keep the loaves in the foil and do the same.  So the gameplan was still on!  Until I opened my yogurt and realised it smelled funny and had some dark brown ooze pooling on the top.  And since I'd rather not inadvertently kill anyone with my zucchini bread, I decided the baking would have to wait until after I purchased new yogurt (and aluminum pans).

While I was shredding the metric buttload of green gourd, Roommate came into the kitchen and inquired about the mess occupying the counter.  I informed him of the above facts, and the notion of yogurt in zucchini bread intrigued him.  Most zucchini breads, I said, require eggs, but since at the time of the baking of the first breads I had only hard boiled eggs in my fridge, I had to find an eggless alternative.

This got me thinking, in the roundabout way that I do, about eggs and the things I know about eggs that you might not know about eggs.  And so I decided that in lieu of the zucchini bread post (seeing as how there is no zucchini bread), I would post about eggs.  For you.  My loyal reader(s).

Hokay!  So.  Eggs.  You know them, you eat them, you love them.  Fried, scrambled, poached, hard-boiled, soft-boiled, as salad.  The incredible edible egg.  Most of us buy our eggs from the refrigerator section of the supermarket and then store them in our fridges at home.  DID YOU KNOW?  You don't really need to refrigerate eggs!  Well, not the farm fresh kind.  If you get yours from the grocery store, I strongly encourage you do so, and here's why.  Eggs are laid with a protective coating that protects against germs and other icky things from getting in through the microscopic pores in the shell (just like we have pores in our skin).  The trouble is, this coating is initially sticky--it dries quickly upon, er, exit--but while it's still sticky, it can pick up dirt and debris from the place the hen pops it out.  And if supermarkets were to sell these dirty looking eggs in the store, there would be much rioting and picketing in the streets by the masses.  Because obviously if something looks dirty, it is dirty.  Except in the case of eggs.  Protective coating, remember?  But because no one wants to buy and eat icky looking eggs, the commercial egg farms wash their eggs.  Power wash them, in fact.  The eggs are put in pyramid shaped baskets and power washed, which, yes, scrubs your eggs to a shiny white, but also strips the protective coating, leaving the pores exposed.  And the dirty water from the top of the baskets?  Guess where that goes.  Yep.  Into the shells of the eggs at the bottom of the basket.  So we take eggs that are ugly on the outside but safe and healthy on the inside and "wash" them to be pretty on the outside but introduce all kinds of ewie things to the inside (and arguably more important side of the egg).  One of these ewies includes salmonella.  Now not all of these eggs actually contain salmonella and if you keep these pretty on the outside eggs in the fridge and make sure you cook 'em real well, you have nothing to worry about.

If we were to NOT wash our eggs on the farm, or at least not POWER wash them but instead rinse them gently, leaving the protective coating intact, we could actually leave our eggs at room temperature for about 2-3 weeks.  For realsies.  After this 2-3 week time frame, the protective coating on the egg starts to deteriorate, and then you have the problem of open pores and gunk getting in.  BUT.  If we were to give the egg an artificial protective coating--done by coating the eggs in lard (see, bacon really does make the world go round) and packing them in something like sand, buckwheat or more lard (cos why not?)--we can keep our eggs for 3-4 months.  MONTHS!  And refrigerating non-washed eggs also extends their lives, not to months, but many weeks.  More than washed eggs, I can assure you.

Here's another cool thing about eggs: you can test their relative freshness before cracking them open and discovering they are, in fact, rotten and horribly sulfury smelling.  How, you ask?  Hold you horses, I'm about to tell you, I reply.  What you do is you get a vessel like a mixing bowl or pot.  Fill it with water.  Put your eggs in the water.  Observe whether your eggs float or sink.  This is where the magic happens.  Put your science hats on.....now.  When an egg goes bad, it creates methane gas (hence the stinky fart smell when you crack a bad one).  Like a balloon filled with helium, an egg filled with methane will float to the top of your water containing vessel.  A super fresh egg will sink like a stone and lay on its side.  Eggs that stand up or just barely come up off the bottom of the vessel are the ones you want to cook and eat ASAP.  They won't kill you, you just don't want them going more bad.

So there you have it.  Awesome things you probably didn't know about eggs.  Next post, I promise, will be the one about All the Zucchini Bread.  AND I will figure out a way to add pictures, to snazz things up a bit!  Until then, my friends!