chickensense

Storing eggs for 6 to 12 months or more is actually very simple.

In The Freezer

To freeze whole eggs, beat them just until blended. Pour them into a freezer container, seal tightly, label with the number of eggs and the date, and freeze. To use, substitute 3 tablespoons thawed whole eggs for 1 large fresh egg. Or, beat one egg at a time and pour each into a cup in an ice tray. Freeze, then pop out the egg cubes and store in freezer Ziploc bags. One cube=1 egg.

Egg whites can be frozen “as is.” Pour them into a freezer container, seal tightly, label with the number of egg whites and the date, and freeze. To use, substitute 2 tablespoons (30 mL) thawed egg whites for 1 large egg.

Egg yolks will thicken or gel when frozen and therefore cannot be used in a recipe unless they receive special treatment. To prevent thickening, beat in either 1/8 teaspoon (0.5 mL) salt, or 1-1/2 teaspoons (7 mL) sugar or corn syrup per 1/4 cup (50 mL) egg yolks (about 4 yolks). Label freezer container with the number of yolks, the date and whether you added salt (for main dishes) or sugar (for desserts and baking) and freeze. Substitute 1 tablespoon (15 mL) thawed yolks for 1 large fresh yolk.

It is best to thaw eggs in the refrigerator and use them as soon as they are thawed. Use them only in dishes that will be thoroughly cooked. Eggs should not be frozen in the shell.

Without Electricity

There are a couple of ways to store eggs without refrigeration. They require cool temperatures, however. A cellar, cool basement, or cool room in the house will suffice. The cooler the better the chance that your eggs will last longer.

One method is to coat the eggs with a non-toxic substance, sealing the pores in the shell and thereby sealing out oxygen and moisture. When no oxygen is present, bacteria can’t grow, thus eggs don’t spoil.

To use lard or shortening to coat the eggs, first melt the grease and cool it til it begins to solidify again. Dip each egg in the melted grease individually and set them on a paper towel to dry. When the shortening or lard is dry on the eggs, rub the eggs with a clean towel, removing excess solid grease. Rub gently and buff each egg. Now repeat the process, before the shortening solidifies. Work fast, allowing the shortening to get almost solid before re-heating it.

Line the bottom of a flat box with a clean soft towel. Place the eggs in the box in a single layer. Cover the box with either a lid or another towel. Place the box of eggs in a cool, dry environment. Eggs prepared this way will last up to 6 months, although I have heard people say that they have kept eggs this way for 1 year if they are kept very cool.

A product that can be used to coat eggs in the same way, but that is supposed to keep the eggs fresh longer, is K-Peg. The eggs are coated with this product much the same way they would be coated with the shortening, and prepared for storage the same way.

A second method to store eggs works on the same principle: cover the pores and keep the eggs cool. However, in this method the eggs are kept immersed in a solution of Liquid Sodium Silicate, also known as liquid glass.

This non-toxic substance will cover the pores of the egg shell so well that you will probably be able to keep fresh eggs for up to 2 years! You can buy it as Sodium Silicate Solution at any pharmacy, however they may not have it on hand and have to order it for you.

Sodium Silicate, is a pale yellow, odorless, syrupy liquid. It is diluted in the proportion of one part of silicate to nine parts of distilled water or sterile water. In any case, the water should be first boiled, and then allowed to cool.

Place clean, fresh eggs in a ceramic crock. Pour liquid sodium silicate over the eggs until the eggs are covered and completely immersed in the solution. Have at least 2 inches of the solution over the top of the eggs. Do not add too many eggs as the ones on the bottom may get crushed and crack, which will spoil all the eggs.

Place a towel over the crock and tie it into place. Place the crock of eggs in a cool, dry place and don’t disturb them until you are ready to use them. To use, just take out as many eggs as you need, wash them off in plain water and use as you normally would.

Liquid Sodium Silicate Storage Tips

Only store eggs with clean shells. Washing an egg with a soiled shell lessens it keeping quality. The protective, gelatinous covering over the shell is removed by water, and when this is gone the egg spoils more rapidly.

The shells also must be free from even the tiniest crack. One cracked egg will spoil a large number of sound eggs when packed in liquid sodium silicate.

Earthenware crocks are good containers. The crocks must be clean and sound. Scald them and let them cool completely before use. A crock holding six gallons will accommodate eighteen dozens of eggs and about twenty-two pints of liquid sodium silicate.

Eggs preserved in this manner can safely be used for soft boiling or poaching for several weeks. Before boiling such eggs prick a tiny hole in the large end of the shell with a needle to keep them from cracking. After the first couple of months, stored eggs should be used only in dishes where they will be thoroughly cooked, for example, omelets, scrambled eggs, custards, cakes and general cookery.

As the eggs age, the white becomes thinner and is harder to beat. The yolk membrane becomes more delicate and it is correspondingly difficult to separate the whites from the yolks. Sometimes the white of the egg becomes tinged pink after very long keeping in liquid sodium silicate. This is due, probably, to a little iron which is in the sodium silicate, but which apparently does not injure the egg for food purposes.

In Cooked Foods

Another way to store eggs is to use them in recipes that can be frozen. These two recipes below use the whites and the yolks from about a dozen eggs. They both freeze wonderfully so you can make plenty during the egg laying season, and save extras for when eggs are less plentiful.

Angel Food Cake

Preheat oven to 375°

1 1/2 cups of egg whites brought to room temperature
1 1/2 cups sifted powered sugar
1 cup cake flour
1 1/2 tsp. cream of tarter
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. almond extract

-Sift powdered sugar and flour seperately once. Measure correct amounts as stated in ingredients and sift together 4 times.
-Place egg whites in large bowl. add salt, cream of tarter, vanilla and almond extracts.
-Beat on medium speed till soft peaks form
-Continue beating and gradually add sugar 2 tablespoons at a time.
-Beat at #8 till stiff peaks form but not dry peaks
-On lowest speed. Add powdered sugar/flour mix, a small amount at a time.
-Remove from mixer and finish mixing by hand with a spatula by folding over carefully.
-Pour(spoon) into ungreased 10″ tube pan.
-With a knife or spatula, carefully cut through batter in circular motion six times to release large bubbles.
-Bake on lowest rack of oven, for 3-5 to 40 min. or till golden brown.
-Invert pan until cool. Loosen with knife or spatula to remove.

Golden Sponge Cake

(Uses up the yolks left from the Angel Food Cake)
Preheat oven to 350°

Egg yolks of the dozen or so eggs
3 cups cake flour
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 cups sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. lemon extract or orange extract
1 cup cold water

-Sift flour and sugar seperately one time before measuring.
-Measure flour and sugar. Sift 3 times together, flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
-In mixing bowl, beat egg yolks on #8 till fluffy and thick.
-Gradually beat add and beat in sugar.
-Turn to #2 speed(low) and add flavorings, and cold water.
-Gradually but quickly add the flour mixture while beating on low speed. Scrape bowl. Beat only enough to blend, about 2 min.
-Pour batter into an ungreased tube pan.
-Bake 1 hour or till golden brown.
-Invert cake to cool.
-Loosen sides with spatula or knife to remove.

(Recipes from Organic Homesteading Gardening Group at Yahoo.com)

Tips for using stored eggs

When you use eggs that have been in storage without electricity, crack them in a cup, not directly into your food. Otherwise you might get an awful surprise and ruin a dish.

Practice these storage techniques before you think you might really need to store eggs. Practice makes perfect!

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One day you can be cruising along on top of the world and the next day disaster strikes. The other night something attacked our chickens and killed 2 hens; our wonderful rooster, Crazy Mike; and one of the baby chicks. Whatever it was also ate ALL of the eggs that were hatching and about to hatch. Then that morning my husband ran over and killed a hen who was sitting under his truck.

Jesse and I worked hard yesterday to repair the damage to one of the chicken coops to make sure nothing could get in again. We put all the remaining hens in the one coop, but we couldn’t find the mother hen and her 2 chicks anywhere. Now that it is light out I’m going to go see if they managed to survive the night unprotected, but I don’t have much hope.

Fortunately I took photos of the mother and babies yesterday so you can see how adorable they were. I can’t believe the attacker ate all the eggs just when they were starting to hatch! I was so excited about the new babies…

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We have determined that we have 3 grown roosters now for sure, our original two, Crazy Mike and Junior, plus one in the newest batch that is very plump and dark greenish black. We think 3 others of the newest 15 are also roosters, but very young. At least 3 more of the 15 are too young to lay, if they are hens.

We are getting 8 eggs a day now from all the hens.

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Jesse found where the ranging hens have been laying! We found 12 eggs in one “nest” in the glass shop this morning. Yay!

We’ve put a loop of fence around each coop separately so that our original chickens will have to stay nearby and lay in their proper nests. The two groups of chickens are still trying to fight each other right through the fence. But the fence isn’t keeping the original gang in. I guess they are so used to wandering now, and the fence isn’t tall enough in some spots so they fly over.

It is soooo cold today! It is 1:00pm and it is not even 40 degrees. Brrrr! I have huge windows with no curtins in my kitchen; it is freezing in here! I got started on the new curtins today, and I’m going to hurry up and finish. It should help keep the kitchen warmer. It hasn’t been getting this cold this early for the last several years; usually highs in the 40s don’t come until January. This does not bode well for our electric bill.

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The jury is still out on the “roosters.” Our chickens all have bumps on their legs where spurs would grow on a rooster, so apparently that isn’t a way to tell male from female until the spurs are actually growing out. I’ve been told to look for long hackle feathers, larger combs, upright posture, longer tails, and long wattles on the roosters. Based on those characteristics, we feel we have one or two roosters in the newest batch. Little Girl, who we bought from the same person, is maybe a rooster too. We’ll just have to wait until we see them laying an egg, or until their spurs and tails grow out to tell for sure.

We are getting 3 or 4 eggs from the 15 new chickens each day which is pitiful. I hope it improves once they settle in. We are only getting one or 2 from our 8(7?) original hens. I think this is because they are laying all over the place instead of in the nests, and we can’t find the eggs. We put up a fence for the original hens today to keep them near their nests so tomorrow we will hopefully get the 4 or 5 eggs we were getting from them in the past.

I can see now why there are so few “free range” egg producers. If you do let them range you can’t find the eggs. We are going to compromise and give them a large fenced yard instead. Their favorite hedgerow is in the yard so I’m sure they will be very happy.

We are keeping the two groups of chickens separate for a while longer because they are really trying to fight each other, even through the fence…

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Since my ankle is hurting I’m not able to go check the new chickens myself to see if they are developing spurs or not. We just got a 3rd egg from the new group, so 3 are hens for sure, which means only 12 could possibly be roosters, not 13 as Jesse said. So… I think I’ll reserve judgement until I can get out and check them myself.

In the mean time I’m a bit worried about the 7 hens we already have because they can’t get to their normal nests since I have the new chickens penned there. Are chickens smart enough to use the nests in the other cage? I’ll let you know this evening.

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It seems that 13 of the 15 “hens” we bought yesterday may be roosters–they have bumps where their spurs are starting to grow in. Also, at least one of the “hens” we bought a few weeks ago, Little Girl, the one Jesse fell in love with, is really Little Guy. We saw and heard “her” crow this morning. (Jesse said, “No wonder Crazy Mike never goes after her.”) So we checked “her” legs, and sure enough, spurs are starting to grow. Now this is really a predicament …

Also, the ankle I twisted trying to catch these chickens is definitely more than twisted, it is sprained. I’m limping around, and it is painful, but slightly better than it was last night.

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I got 15 new chickens today. I’m so sorry I forgot to take pictures of us all running around like nuts trying to catch them. I got wounded early in the race–twisted my ankle–so I had to mostly watch from the sidelines.

These were mostly Red Star and Black Star hens, and a few of their offspring. Red Stars and Black Stars are hybrid, brown-egg-laying chickens, which are a cross between the world’s top laying chickens, Leghorns (which lay white eggs), and high-producing, brown egg layers such as Rhode Island Reds. They make the best brown-egg layers; however you never know what you’ll get in their offspring.

Four of the new hens are for some of our friends, as well as our young rooster, so that leaves us with 19 hens, and our beloved rooster, Crazy Mike. I’m hoping to get a dozen eggs a day during the winter, once the new hens settle in, and by spring, when the youngest ones begin laying, we should really be cranking.

I have been really surprised by the huge demand for free-range eggs here, yet there are so few producers. Come spring, I will really focus on building a flock of exceptional layers, beginning with new chicks in the spring. I want to get away from the hybrids, though, so I can hatch my own replacements as time goes on, and maintain a consistent level of quality, without the expense of buying chicks every year. In short, I will strive for sustainability.

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I got 5 new hens on Saturday. They are a hybrid type called Red Star or Black Star, depending on the color. I got 3 of the black and 2 of the red. The fellow I bought them from raised them as day old chicks from McMurry Hatchery. They are supposed to be really good egg layers. The day after we got them we got 2 eggs from them!

Now I have 9 hens, and 2 roosters. I’m finding a new home for the biggest rooster and will keep the other one with the hens.

There are a lot more photos on my web site, www.chickensense.com.

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We got our first chicken egg today. What a thrill when my son came running in with it. From the nest it was in, we think it is from one of the 2 new Australorpe hens.

We just can’t wait until the others start laying. The days are getting shorter and colder and often when a hen hasn’t started laying by now they don’t start until spring. Some people put lights in the chicken house for several hours in the evening to fool the chickens, but we’ve decided to just wait and see.

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We got new chickens today! A gorgeous green-black colored rooster we’ve named Crazy Mike, and 2 black hens, plus a young green-black rooster.

I’ve posted some of the photos on my site: www.chickensense.com/chickens.asp. I’ll add more there, and here, soon.

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We are anxiously awaiting the cooler weather so we can get working outside building a goat shed. We are going to use saplings from our heavily wooded areas to build it ourselves. At the farm we visited this summer, I saw that they built the goat shed by putting two posts at each end of the walls and just put poles in between them. They kept stacking poles until the wall was tall enough. We are going to try that with poles made from saplings.

Then next we are going to build a bigger chicken pen. I am going to get 25 chicks from a hatchery to raise and then butcher for the freezer. Including feed to raise them for 8 weeks, it’ll cost around $25 total. Pretty good deal for free-range, organic chicken. If all goes as planned, I’ll do it around 3 times a year: early spring, summer, and then fall. I’ve been wanting to do this for forever–I’m so afraid of what they put in meat from the grocery store–but I’ve been hesitant since I don’t know how to butcher chickens; but now David has a friend who has a farm, and he is going to teach me.

Hurry up fall!

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It really amazes me that our chickens have such distinct personalities! The 2 we have right now have become inseparable friends, even though they just met a month ago. As you can see from the photos in earlier blog entries, one is striped white and black (a barred plymouth rock) and the other is brown (a rhode island red). So naturally we call them Blackie and Brownie. We raised Blackie from a day old chick, and Brownie was given to us when she was a few months old.

A couple of nights ago, when evening came, we couldn’t find brownie, which we knew meant that we’d never get Blackie into the cage. If you have Brownie, though, Blackie will follow you anywhere. Strangely enough, it is easier to catch and handle Brownie, who was not hand raised, than Blackie who we’ve raised and carried and played with from the beginning.

Anyway, this time we managed to catch Blackie, and were looking for Brownie. It was getting dark and it was getting hard to see. Since Blackie won’t go far from Brownie, we focused on the area where we had found Blackie. Finally we could hear Brownie cheaping overhead. She had roosted in a small cedar tree! No wonder Blackie wouldn’t leave the area. We shooed her down and Blackie clawed and scratched her way out of my arms to run and check on her.

When we started walking to their shelter, Blackie took off following us but kept doubling back to make sure Brownie was coming. Then they both calmly walked right into the shelter. Too funny! Brownie is so independant, wandering all over, with Blackie tagging along and sort of guarding her.

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Watching the chickens…

And later, watching the bonfire…

Good night.

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Attached is a photo of our remodeled chicken coop. A friend, Michael, fixed the coop up for me with chicken wire on the bottom to keep the dogs and possums out. The old chicken cages are getting so old they weren’t enough protection for the birds. Michael also put a little gate on the new one so I can easily feed and water the chickens.

As soon as I can scrounge enough materials to make a second chicken shed, I am ordering 25 cockerels (male chicks) from McMurray Hatchery for $15. I’ll raise them for 8 weeks, then a neighbor who is a hunter will butcher and dress the chickens for me. I’ll pay him in chickens. So I’ll have about 15 organically-raised, free-range chickens in the freezer for less than $25 including feed.

At the Fresh Market, organic, free-range chicken sells for $3 per pound! After my first batch, I hope to do a second batch to sell. Right now Fresh Market and the other health food stores in town get their free-range chickens from Petaluma, CA! When I asked the managers why, they said no one around here has any. So I’ve definitely got a market when I get the chickens ready.

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So you’ll never guess what I’ve been doing this afternoon (I had to start early so they’d be done by supper time): I cooked black-eyed peas with ham hocks. I had a heckuva time finding ham hocks the other day! No one knew what they were. I finally asked the meat dept lady and she knew. They are pigs ankles! Bony and weird looking, too.

Southern Style Blackeye Peas

-= Ingredients =-
2 cups Blackeye peas ; (16 oz package)
1 cup Uncooked rice
1/2 teaspoon Pepper
1 small Ham hock
8 cups Cold water
Salt to taste

-= Instructions =-
Place ham hock in water; bring to boil; reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Add peas to ham, continue simmering 1 1/2 hours, add rice and simmer 45 minutes or until rice and peas are done and liquid is almost absorbed. Remove meat from bone/ Serve peas and rice on hot platter, place ham on top.

I also made southern cornbread which is made with no sugar or honey. David hates cornbread that has any kind of sweetener. Jesse and I like it with a bit of sugar though, so I make both kinds. Now I’m going to make biscuits. This will only be the 2nd time I’ve made biscuits. I’ve always avoided anything that had to be kneaded, but now that I’ve done it once I’ve found it’s not so bad at all. Plus I made bread in the bread machine, and we had pancakes for brunch.

Aunt Jemima Southern Cornbread

-= Ingredients =-
1 cup Cornmeal
1 cup All purpose flour
2 tablespoon Sugar ; (2 to 4 tablespoons)
4 teaspoon Baking Powder
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1 cup Milk
1 Egg
1/4 cup Vegetable oil

-= Instructions =-
Preheat oven to 425.
In a large bowl, combine corn meal, flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
Add milk, egg, and oil. Beat until fairly smooth, about 1 minute.
Bake in a greased or sprayed 8-inch square baking pan for 20 to 23 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean.

We’ve been raising 2 chicks, Rhode Island Reds. One died last week because it got hold of some old, moldy feed in an old cage outside. We just finished setting up a pen outside for the other. This will be her first night outside. She looks very happy eating bugs in the grass. Now that the weather is finally getting warm we’re ordering 25 chicks from a hatchery. I’m going to go into egg production big time. Eventually I hope to learn to butcher chickens, or get someone to do it for us. I am getting afraid to eat chicken from the store.

The weather is gorgeous here. I just got in from the garden. All four of my rose bushes are blooming like crazy. 2 of them are soooo fragrant! I have a 3 year old peach tree but we had a really late frost and lost the peaches. Too bad, this year would we probably would have gotten our first peaches to eat. I have a nice strawberry patch that is a few years old but the berries aren’t ready yet. These are ever-bearing so they really get going in June. Plus I have 2 blueberry bushes that are 4 years old. We should have a nice crop this year. I have to cover them with netting so that the birds don’t get all the berries.

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