ping Mary Fisher

[Dave]

Some weeks ago, you advised on storing eggs and I think one of your answers was a yes to using water as a storage medium. Can you please re post what you said about storing eggs please?

Dave

[Andy Burns]

Water glass?

[terry]

[Dave]

Dave

[Dave]

[geoff]

You can use very strong brine

[Mary Fisher]

a) I can't remember advising on egg storage, sorry, we just keep ours in boxes in the pantry for months.

b) if I did say anything it wouldn't have been just 'water', but waterglass - sodium metasilicate. This is dissolved in water in a container (a friend used buckets but she had a lot of hens) and the eggs placed in it and taken out when they were needed.

I've heard of people using wax for the same purpose but that would be difficult and messy, imo.

I think the principle is that the pores of the eggs are sealed by this method and bacteria can't enter.

I almost certainly will have said that keeping eggs in the fridge isn't a good idea.

Sorry I can't help further, I've stopped keeping my sent posts :-(

Mary

[Andy Dingley]

Isinglass and waterglass are totally different things.

Neither is easy to obtain these days. I can't recommend waterglass for egg preservation (a traditional use) because it's just such a pig to get hold of. My last supply was cold-war surplus (it's useful for decontaminating mustard gas contamination on concrete, by sealing it in) and four of the six cans in the box had already rusted through and leaked. It's still excellent as a stabiliser for dusty concrete.

[Andy Burns]

What's used for beer finings instead?

[Steve Firth]

I can supply waterglass if anyone is desperately interested, there's no need to go ferreting around for war surplus stuff in rusting tins.

[Andy Dingley]

Still called "Isinglass", which seems to have stretched its meaning from "swim bladders of sturgeons" to "boiled fish innards, of sundry origin". Much of this is the gills of farmed salmon AFAIK, on account of still being cheap as a waste product.

As there's a growing demand for vegan beer too, as well as cost issues, an increasing number of artisan brewers are switching to non- animal finings such as carragheen.

[Steve Firth]

Eggs can be stored in waterglass, which is sodium silicate solution. It's supplied for home use as a liquid which you dilute 1+9 (eg 250ml ->

2.5 litres).

It's fairly straight forward to use. Check the eggs over carefully for cracks. Don't attempt to preserve cracked eggs. The cracked eggs will contaminate the rest. Use clean eggs, you don't want droppings on them, nor do you want to have to wash them. Washing eggs makes them difficult to preserve.

Place the eggs into a ceramic or glass container. Layering them carefully. Choosing an appropriate container is difficult since the size of the eggs affects the packing density. Have a few dry runs with some likely containers to find the best fit. Ikea sell some glass jars which are wide, have vertical sides and have an alloy push-fit lid. These are ideal. You should put the containers through the dishwasher before use or wash them in hot water. With ceramics you can scald them.

Make up the waterglass solution. Some prefer to half fill the container then add the eggs, others to pack the egss then pour the solution over the eggs. Cover the container (this is where the Ikea lid comes in handy) and move somewhere cool, somewhere that you are not going to have to disturb the eggs. Cellars are ideal, and I suspect the fact that few people have a cellar nowadays is one reason that this sort of preservation isn't used as much as it used to be.

Check the container for evaporation and top up wth distilled or boiled water as necessary.

To use the eggs remove them from the solution, rinse in cold water. Crack the eggs into a cup before use, one by one, to ensure that if one of them does go off it doesn't contaminate the rest. They aren't really suitable for use for boiling because the waterglass seals the pores in the egg and they explode when boiled. You could try making a needle hole in the big end of the egg before boiling.

Generally the eggs are OK for about six months for boiling, then they can be used for another two months for frying. After that the yolk membrane breaks down and they're only good for cakes/scrambling.

[Steve Firth]

Much of what is sold as "isinglass" is plain old cow-derived gelatin, the better stuff is made from swim bladders of various fish, including salmon. Apparently for some uses Russian sturgeon derived isinglass is still used, which must cost a bloody fortune.

[Andy Dingley]

Where do you get yours? Roughly what does it cost these days?

And how do you best dilute it? I've often had trouble with it refusing to mix.

[Steve Firth]

I run a small biochemistry lab, so I can get it through the chemical supplier that we get all the rest of our stuff through.

About £11/Kg.

Well, I cheap and use a lab mixer which whangs the solution and DI water together at high speed, like a large stick blender.

[Steve Firth]

Or cheat, no hang on I am cheap. Oh whatever.

[Peter]

Steve £11 a kilo from where and how many pints/galls would that mix into

And This is the same stuff that grows 'Magic Gardens' isn't it

Many thanks

Peter

>

[Mary Fisher]

I never had any trouble diluting it, you must start with a small amount of water to a larger amount of waterglass and go from there. Try the other way round and you'll have a problem.

Mary

[Owain]

If you cheep perhaps you've been eating too many eggs

Owain

[Steve Firth]

From me.

About 10Kg of water, 17.5 pints, a bit over two gallons.

Yes, it's the same stuff.