Hi George, There are several schools of thought on washing or not to wash eggs. On the big factory farms every egg that goes through the plant gets a bath and is blow dried before it is placed in a carton. Some even say that they get sprayed with a thin coat of wax to seal up the pores so they have a longer shelf life. The detergent they use is many times stronger than anything we would use at home. The stuff they use would cause detergent burns on your hands if you didn't wear industrial strength rubber gloves.
I have heard the excuse of the bloom being washed away and the possibility of the eggs soaking up things through the waterproof membrane and making the egg taste nasty. I have never had that
problem and if an egg is cracked it isn't used for human consumption.
[Except if you are short on eggs and the egg was frozen solid]. An egg that otherwise looks good will often show hair line cracks after it has been in water a few seconds.
One reason I haven't had a problem is because I wash them in luke warm water. The egg exits the rear of the hen at 103 degrees farenheit which is at least 23 degrees warmer than luke warm. The eggs don't sit in the bath water more than a few minutes tops [only if they are extremely dirty] and then get rinsed thoroughly and then allowed to air dry on a towel before being placed in a carton. Once they have been rinsed you can't even smell any residual soap residue on the shell. Most of the eggs just get inspected and rinsed since they weren't showing dirt but needed to be rinsed to rid them of possible dust and to check for toe nail punctures and spider webbing caused by pressure cracks.
If a person keeps their hen house scrumptiously clean then I would agree
that they can skip the washing process and just lightly rinse the stuck on feathers and straw off a few eggs and be done with it.
I had a rather lengthy discussion on another site about washing hatching eggs. I learned that those people who participate in the NPIP program usually lightly wash their eggs in luke warm water with a little bleach to kill any surface germs before they set these eggs in the incubator. I also do this to my own eggs just before they go into the incubator. The incubator is one of the best places in the world to grow bacteria in epidemic proportions because of the warm, dark, and moist environment. Add a few dirty eggs with a lot of bacteria on the shell and you have the makings of a mini disease epidemic.
This bleach rinse is done to keep down the bacteria in the incubator and keeps the chicks from getting navel infections. This is a much gentler approach than fumigation of the incubator and the eggs, as is done by commercial hatcheries, with a caustic fumigation treatment part way through the incubation cycle. Some hatcheries fumigate twice during the incubation cycle.
When I lived at home we seldom ever washed an egg unless it was extremely dirty or they were going to be sold. At that time all of my
hobby chickens and guineas were raised under bantam hens. So as you can see I have done it both ways and neither way has managed to kill me yet. LOL
I have ceased to argue the point with most people. I have been a member of several Homesteading sites in the past and have been verbally beat ragged by people and their unwashed internet friends who believe wholistic [or Hosistic or Holism]is set in stone and even taking a bath cleanses away the miracle of creation and homeostasis. People like these claim to be deep thinkers but come off as nonthinkers who do everything the easiest and laziest way possible just to get by. They toss around a plethora of big words to cover any contingency for not taking a bath more than two times per year and they yield those big excuse words as expertly as the tooth fairy yields her magic wand.
These people put things into their refrigerator just the way they came from nature [dirt and all] and it is a wonder they haven't died or killed themselves and their kids with ptomaine posioning. Raw milk and other dairy products do not store well together with meat, garden dirt, and dried chicken manure in the same damp environment.
To give you a short example of what is crawling around in my mind right now here is a short and true story. A man I worked with and I were invited to the house of another man we worked with to see his new rental house and to help him move a few more loads of stuff from their old house. Since both of us had a pickup truck [and he didn't] we got guilt tripped into aiding the less fortunate.
After working and hauling furnature and other stuff across town for the next 5 hours solid, 7am to noon, we were invited to stay for dinner. I pretty well knew my host's people because I had worked with his father long before this young man showed up at the job. His father was the type of person that if a fly messed with his sandwich too much he tossed it in the trash.
This young man's wife was a different type of individual. She was home schooled and we were later to learn that she was raised by free spirit, back to nature, sometimes nudist, wholistic, hippie type parents. This deffinately gave this girl a different twist on life.
She was about to fix the meal and said I hope you like burger! And then leaned down to get a skillet off the floor that a cat was eating out of and wiped it out into the trash with a paper towel. She then put it on the burner, fired it up, dropped a few burgers in the skillet, and the big guy I arrived with ran out the door.
I excused myself "because I had dinner waiting at home" and could honestly get by with it. And then I soon followed the big guy out the door.
When I arrived at work a few short hours later I approached my large friend and asked him straight faced, "Don't you like hamburger?" To which he replied,"The burger was fine. I'm allergic to cat spit."
So George, If I come off sounding like a Goody two shoes or Mister Clean you can relate back to this posting as a reference. There are those times in our lives when we wish it were possible to actually pop the cap on our skull and wash our brain with a big brush. But since we can't we have to learn to live with it the best we can. Dean
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"Old George" <barnmanager@...> wrote:
I agree with everything Dean has written except the use of detergent to clean the eggs. Sorry Dean, Egg shells are leak once the "bloom" has been washed off. Now one could argue that the membrane inside the shell would protect the insides but I don't think so. Don't want dish soap in my breakfast.
Ol' George
