« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2011, 04:44:41 pm »
How Long Do Eggs Stay Fresh?
According to the American Egg Board (
www.AEB.org) here's your answer.
"The oil coating which seals the shell's pores helps to prevent bacteria from entering the egg and reduces moisture loss from the egg. RAW SHELL EGGS REFRIGERATED IN THEIR CARTONS WILL KEEP FOR ABOUT 4 TO 5 WEEKS BEYOND THE PACK DATE WITHOUT SIGNIFICANT QUALITY LOSS. (The pack date is usually a number from 1 to 365 representing the day of the year starting with January 1 as 1 and ending with December 31 as 365.)"
"Properly handled and stored, eggs rarely "spoil". If you keep them long enough, they are more likely to simply dry up! But, don't leave eggs out at room temperature. They'll age more in 1 day at room temperature than they will in 1 week in the refrigerator. Room temperature is also an ideal temperature for bacterial growth."
If you think about it, there seems to be no good reason for packaging eggs with their wide end up as opposed to plunking them into the cartons wide-end down: either way will keep the egg from rolling off. Yet cardboard cartons and the plastic egg-tray in refrigerators are made to accommodate a fat-end-up egg. Is there something more here than just coincidence?
In fact, there is: the reason it’s smarter to store your eggs with the fat end up is that the egg itself does not completely fill the interior of the shell. If you crack open a hard-boiled egg carefully at the fat end, you will see that the white part of the egg, called the albumen, does not quite reach the shell — there’s a pocket of air in-between the two. That isn’t the case for the narrow end of the egg, which fits snugly.
That pocket of air allows for the presence, and reproduction, of bacteria. This is not to say there’s something wrong with your egg: any chicken egg will have the air pocket and some measure of bacteria inside it. The trick, then, is to keep the bacteria as far as possible from the yolk, which is much more susceptible to bacterial infection. Albumen contains bacteria-killing enzymes while yolk does not. In other words, the yolk is more perishable than the white.
If you hold the egg fat end down, that air pocket has a tendency to rise — not completely through the egg, but enough to reach the yolk. By storing eggs fat-end up, the pocket of air stays away from the yolk, and the egg stays fresh longer.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2011, 04:47:53 pm by doganjo »
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Always have been, always will be, a WYSIWYG - black is black, white is white - no grey in my life! But I'm mellowing in my old age
Topic: How long do eggs stay freash for (Read 5314 times)
