Category Archives: Kitchen Tips

Should eggs be stored on the countertop?

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Should you store farm eggs on the countertop?

You probably read the little article that circulated social media about how Europeans never store their eggs in the fridge. How convenient, right? More space for leftovers, potential for edible kitchen decor, and all those recipes that call for a room-temperature egg, you are now totally ready for!

But is room-temperature storage of eggs right for Americans, even those Americans that buy directly from a natural-practices farm like ours?

The European culture is just different. They are a market-centric culture, buying daily or at least a few times a week, whereas in the US, we tend to do things Sam’s-Club-Style. Everything in bulk. Fewer trips to the store. More storage space. Everything is big here. Really big.

In fact, many of us have jumbo refrigerators plus a storage fridge besides, whereas European refrigerators are relatively small. We can afford to store a few dozen eggs at a time. It’s a good thing, too, because it’s pretty rare to be close enough to a quality source of groceries that you pass it on your walk home from work.

It simply isn’t practical for most of us here in the Arklatex to visit the store daily, so we make our special drive and stock up while we’re there, hoping it will be at least a week until we have to go again. Some of our crazy customers buy a month’s worth of eggs at a time, either to take advantage of our 10-dozen discount price, or because we only hit their town once a month. Eggs keep very well when refrigerated. Why not?

So back to the question. Eggs keep well. But can we keep them on the counter? I’ll keep the rest short.

The reason I don’t recommend storing eggs long-term on the countertop

Only perfect eggs can handle room-temperature storage for long periods.

That means no cracks. Minimal dirt. Very minimal washing. But no cracks…that’s tough. Here at Shady Grove Ranch, we check Every.Single.Egg. that is produced by our hens, using a combination of visual, candling, and “belling.” And we have a pretty good pass record, but with as many eggs as we process by hand, we are bound to miss a few here and there, because (no surprise here) some cracks are SUPER hard to see.

This is how an egg looks during candling, the process of shining a bright light into the shell to reveal shell and internal anomalies.

To demonstrate how hard cracks can be to see, I digitally manipulated this photo and circled what I believe to be a crack in the shell. Can you see it now?

But even if we caught every single crack during packing, the eggs still have a long way to go. After the hen lays the egg in the box, it rolls away to safety where she can’t peck at it or soil it. That afternoon, we collect all the eggs and carefully transport them back to the grading room via ATV (because remember, our hens are pasture-raised, so the chickens are sometimes quite far from “civilization!”). Then we sort the eggs, grade, candle, and package the clean ones, wash the dirties, and sort, grade, candle and package those, and then move them all to cold storage.

Then on delivery day, we load them up and transport them to whatever venue you buy them from. Then you cart them home and to your kitchen. There’s a lot of chance for breakage in there, especially if your 4-year-old insists on “helping” you put groceries away! “Not the eggs, honey!” (Been there, done that, haha!)

If an egg gets cracked, even a little, the protective membranes are no longer as functional, and gas transfer begins to occur inside the egg, and eventually bacteria will be able to grow and turn a lovely, fresh egg into a stinky rotten egg! The worse the crack and warmer the temperature, the faster this happens.

Before you start frantically checking your eggs for cracks, though, remember this: Refrigeration SIGNIFICANTLY slows down spoilage. Remember that egg-sorting step? What happens to all the cracked eggs, you ask? THE CADMANS EAT THEM! Yep. It’s been a long time since I worked with eggs that weren’t pre-cracked! 😉 And I can tell you that refrigerated-cracked eggs keep plenty long in the fridge with no issues. But on the counter… within a couple of weeks, I will see some spoiled eggs come along. Yuck!

The long and short of it is this. You COULD keep eggs on the counter, and I often do for a day or two. OK, so sometimes it turns into a week, if they last that long, or if I forget about them! But to get the best quality and longest shelf-life, I prefer to keep mine in the fridge. Even crack-less eggs will eventually go bad on the counter, even though it does take a long time. So we just say, keep ’em refrigerated. And don’t be afraid to stock up! They really do last for months at fridge temperatures. A bonus for having that extra “egg fridge” is it’s a great place to store things like homemade sauerkraut, extra raw milk & yogurt, and veggies I got a good deal on in-season.

How do you know if an egg has gone bad?

The short answer is… a rotten egg is unmistakable! They smell terrible and look weird–the colors aren’t right and the yolk will not be intact and may be completely mixed with the white. If in doubt, toss it out! If you do choose to store eggs on the counter in hotter months, I suggest breaking each egg into a separate container before adding it to your mixing container or pan. That way if you do happen upon a spoiled egg, you don’t contaminate your whole meal!

A quick way to make sure an egg is fresh before cracking it is to drop it in a deep dish of water. If it floats, it’s bad. If it sinks, it’s good! The reason? A good egg is mostly water, but contains protein and shell that make it just slightly denser than water, causing it to sink. A bad egg has already begun to dehydrate and ferment and fill with CO2, thus making it less dense than water, and it will rise to the surface.

So now you’re an eggs-spert. 🙂 Enjoy those real pasture-raised SGR eggs!

 

Why does fat go SPLAT?

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I was just chatting with someone about whether or not one could “harvest” the fat that floats to the top of broth while it’s cooking, and use it just like lard. I told her you could, but that it’s not as straightforward to use as regular old rendered lard, that it might tend to explode if heated for frying, and I thought this might be a great topic to share here.

The question was, Can I harvest the fat that rises to the top of my pot during broth-making? 

Interesting factoid–if you do this with chicken, the official name of the fat is Schmaltz. Of course, the term “schmaltz” refers to wet-rendered or dry-rendered fat, as long as it comes from poultry. Lard is the oil rendered from pork fat. Tallow is the oil rendered from beef fat.

Dry- vs. Wet-Rendering of Fat

But today we’re going to talk about any kind of fat that rises to the top of a pot of broth. Let’s call it “wet-rendered” fat. The distinction is to separate it from “dry rendered” fat, in which you put chopped or ground raw fat into a dry pot, maybe add just a smidge of water to keep the tissues from scorching while the first of the oil renders out, but then after that, for all intents and purposes, you basically have a pot full of oil with no appreciable water-based liquid in there. When people talk about “rendering lard,” they are talking about the dry-rendering process. 

Is it a good idea to do Wet-Rendering?

So the answer to the question of whether you can harvest the layer of fat on top of broth… is yes! You can keep and use the fat that rises while broth-ing. But fat skimmed from the top of broth is going to tend to have a high residual moisture content.

That means when you try to fry something with it, it’s going to tend to splatter a lot!

Why?

Because the boiling temperature of water (212F) is much lower than the typical frying temperature of oil (ballpark of 350F to 400F depending on what you’re doing). If you try to heat the water-laden oil quickly, the water will effectively superheat and create volatile pockets of steam. When they try to rise out of the viscous oil… POP! Lots of little (and sometimes big!) explosions!! And burns, messes, and frustration can follow!

What can you do to safely salvage “wet-rendered” fat?

Here are a couple of ideas:

Method 1: Chill the broth first.

If you thoroughly chill the broth with fat still on top, you will be able to peel/scrape the hardened fat from the top of the broth, which will have gelled at the bottom of the container. The more saturated the fat (as with beef fat), and the colder you chill it, the harder the fat layer will be. With beef fat, you will actually be able to “chip” away the fat, whereas with pork and chicken fat, the fat layer will be softer, like slightly softened butter. Either way, the separation between broth and fat will be VERY distinct.

Cons: Unless you’re REALLY careful, there will still be some residual moisture (aka broth) sticking to the fat, and you may still have issues with splattering. Another negative to this method is that broth actually keeps better with the fat layer intact. If you disturb it in order to harvest the fat for other uses, you’ll need to use or freeze the broth right away, as it will spoil within a couple of days otherwise.

Method 2: Triple-skim the fat/broth.

This is going to be a very labor- and dirty-dish intensive method, but it will yield a very low-moisture oil if you do a good job.

How to do it: When your broth is done cooking, turn off the heat and let it sit, covered, for a while so the oil layer settles into place with no broth bubbling up through it. Use a ladle to skim as much of the oil layer as you can get at without bringing over too much liquid.

Remember those little paperweight toys with the two layers of liquid that never mix?

That’s the idea. You want only the oil to come through when you’re skimming! Repeat this process a couple more times until you’re satisfied that there is no broth left below the oil. Narrower containers will make this easier, as they will make the oil layer deeper and easier to skim near the top. Another thing to keep in mind is that for this method to work, the oil has to still be liquid, meaning the whole concoction must be a little warmer than solidying temperature, which is usually around 78-100 degrees for animal fats, somewhere in there. If it’s a really cold day, you may have to rewarm the broth a little for this to work.

Method 3: Low-temp boil the water out.

A sure-fire way to get every last bit of water out is to bring the oil up to water-boiling temperature (212F) and gently boil the water away. This method definitely has some downsides: It is time-consuming, and it’s the most dangerous method for the reasons I explained at the very beginning. If you try to do this at too high a temperature, you’ll run into the splattering issue. Also, if you’re not close by when the water finally evaporates, the oil will begin to heat rapidly and may start to smoke if unattended. You’ll also have to adjust the heat until you find that sweet spot that makes the water boil, but doesn’t cause splattering. I do use this method, especially if I am going to fry chicken using that very oil, but I don’t go far from the stove while I’m doing it. When I hear the boiling water slow down, I know I’m just about done.

My advice?

Unless there’s just a huge amount of oil atop your broth, leave it! Fat in soup adds flavor and filling characteristics, plus nutrients. And it extends the shelf life of broth significantly. Lots of modern cookbooks say “skim the fat and discard it!” But I just haven’t seen any compelling reasons to do that with pasture-raised meats. Instead, if you want cooking fat, save the drippings from bacon and sausage, or render raw fat (beef or pork) using the “dry” method.