How to preserve an egg forever, Old school methods

Every wonder how to preserve an egg forever? Is it even possible? Everything spoils eventually right? well.. yes of course. But fear not, there is actually a way to preserve eggs for a very long time, years even. And get this, They stay as fresh as the day the chick laid em’.. at least for 6 months. After that well maybe not as fresh.

Don’t believe me? Well its true! Now I’m going to show you how.

Back before freeze drying, dehydrators and all the other preservation methods you can think of, their was nothing like that. Just simple preservation methods such as smoking and water baths, salt packing etc.

Of course there were more but the point I’m trying to make is there was no refrigerators or reliable cold storage of any kind. So how did people back than deal with having dozens of fresh eggs everyday? A magical rock called limestone.

Powdered lime mixed with water is all you need to preserve egg’s for years. At least that’s a theoretical maximum. Most people used this method to preserve eggs for winter.

Check out our other articles on the benefits of preserving food

There are actually 2 methods to preserve eggs long term in this manner

if you want to learn how to preserve an egg forever, You should know the 2 main methods of preserving raw full eggs. The water glass method and the slaked lime method.

With water glass, You use sodium silicate as the preservation agent. I recommend you just buy a modern pack of this rather than trying to make it yourself. I’m sure amazon will inject an add here for you somewhere.

Besides being significantly less work, it’s also much more pure and you wont have to worry about any cross contamination in flavors. Your egg will taste like an egg.

As for the other method, The main one i like the most, Lime. When lime is ‘slaked/slacked’ together with water (mixing the 2 together) a chemical reaction is started which creates calcium hydroxide.

This is commonly known by the name limewater.

Recipe for preserving an egg forever

The Slacked Lime Method

You should use a 5 gallon food safe bucket for this so you have enough space to put in several dozen eggs at a time.

Add lime powder you probably ordered from amazon *queue ad lmao* to the bucket and start adding boiled water until it’s about the same general consistency of what a thing coffee cream would be.

That’s about 1 pound to 1 gallon, give or take. Really it’s an estimate, please be careful, you may need to add more lime if you make it too thin, not that big of a deal though, just.. annoying?

Let it sit and cool down to room temperature.

Now you have a choice, You could leave it in the food safe 5 gallon bucket, Or you could transfer it to a stone or porcelain or something to that nature. Dealers choice as they say.

Add the eggs. Make sure they are pointing down. (pointed end downwards). Also make sure the eggs you are preserving are not cracked, or dirty. Don’t clean the eggs, DON’T CLEAN YOUR EGGS. The bloom is necessary for good preservation. Try to get eggs that are as clean as possible with out having to clean them. You may wipe them down a bit with a dry cloth to make sure all the hard debris are off, though. Just be careful not to damage the egg.

I also think it goes with out saying, Don’t move the container once you have it loaded with eggs. Make sure your doing this in the spot it will rest, as jostling the container will end up with broken eggs which is a bit counter productive I think :).

You can continue to add eggs to the mixture every day as needed. This will keep eggs tasting fresh for 6 months, after that they shouldn’t go bad, however they will degrade. You may need to re-create the lime-water after it starts to look icky.

Water Glass Method

Mix the the pre-made water glass powder via the instructions on the package. Usually boiling water to make sure its sterilized.

Just like with the slaked lime recipe, Don’t wash your eggs, Pick the cleanest ones with no cracks. Add the eggs into the container the same way you would for lime, pointy side down. These also keep for around 6 months, after that it’s up to you how you wish to proceed.

The ideal situation is you use the eggs within the 6 months anyway. Hope you enjoyed learning how to preserve an egg forever!

Go ahead and check this video out on water-glassing done my the channel homesteading family.