Sunday 15 February 2009

Dried Eggs

While I’ve not been able to post for a bit due to my Internet connection giving up the ghost – I do wonder if France Telecom/Orange France will ever be able to provide anything like the service I had in the UK – I luckily had looked on the web earlier for information about drying eggs. So unable to waste time surfing I set about putting what I’d learnt into practice.

I decided to start with 5 eggs; the idea being to get a thin layer in the dehydrator otherwise it takes too long to dry the egg. As it is, the tiers in my dehydrator are slightly tilted so the egg at the outer edge was deeper than the inside edge.

The eggs were beaten well and then poured onto the lightly greased tray. They were then dried for a bit over 5 hours at the highest setting, around 60°C. One of the posts I read said that this heat and time were essential as this in effect pasteurised the egg as well as drying it.

Because of the difference in thickness across the tray I set the original time to 4 hours and then stirred the mix, then continued dehydrating until all the egg was dry.


Once all the egg had dried I then ground the egg to a powder in an electric grinder and transferred the resulting powder to an airtight jar for storage.


Other ways described to store the egg is in the freezer, vacuum-sealed or in zip lock bags. Once I’ve got my Internet connection back I’m going to do some more research into the storage but for the moment the jar is going to live in the fridge.

To reconstitute the egg, it’s one tablespoon of dried egg to one tablespoon of water and that’s equivalent to one egg that can be used for cakes, omelettes or scrambled eggs. The next job is to try it out.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Very clever. Looking forward to hearing what you think of the reconstituted result :-)

Barbara Martin said...

I'm keeping tuned because this is a handy way to keep eggs from going bad.

Mickle in NZ said...

Great idea,looking forward to finding out the reslts and uses.

My folks use to dries slices from a late summer plum with red flesh. The slight art plums were freestone so a joy to prepare and slice.

Folks moved away from there in 2002 and have since got rid of their drier/dehydrator. I just didn't have the space to take.

Keep warm and cosy, huggles and care from Michelle and Zeb, xxx

Moonwaves said...

This reminds me of a sketch from a sit com/sketch show with Ronnie Corbett (I think. The little one anyway.) His mum was trying out a recipe for cake which she or her mum had used during the war but had forgotten that then all the recipes used dried egg and so was ending up with some very soggy and otherwise disgusting results.

It's a beautiful colour in the jar though.

Unknown said...

So have you tried it out yet? Am waiting to see if the result was tasty when reconstituted

Cheers from Tasmania

dND said...

Quick egg update - I've reconstituted one eggs worth and yes it did work, it ended up a cross between an omelet and scrambled eggs as I've not got the water ratio right yet. It's wasn't as tasty as the fresh eggs but I think it would be fine with added herbs and seasoning and it would be great in cakes.

I'm planning on a better experiment some time when I have time that I'll do another blog about. This interim test was positive enough for me to dry some more eggs.

Thank you all for your comments, I know I'm getting a bit behind with responding but the spring workload has kicked in!!

Ron said...

Moonwaves sent me a link to your post. Very interesting! I've got a couple of hogs now, so all extra eggs are spoken for, but I like the option for when we do have excess!

We've tried freezing, and it works ok but a bit rubbery for eating plain... probably fine for recipes.

Ron