on egg-washing
Nov. 1st, 2018 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2DeR3yQ
I was writing about something else, but I thought, you know, I should talk about washing eggs. It’s one of the farm chores I’ve spent a lot of time on, mostly because it’s unskilled and doesn’t require a great deal of strength or coordination, so literally anyone can do it, so I do it a lot.
Why do we wash eggs? Why is that a thing? Well, I’ll explain.
So most commercial egg facilities use battery cages for their hens, so the hens are stuck in a very small space and so when they lay an egg, it lands on a slanted surface and gently rolls away from the hen, so it can be collected easily. This means it doesn’t get soiled at all, and so I don’t know if commercial eggs get washed or not!
(I do know that in some countries, you are not allowed to wash eggs. In others, you are required to wash them. In the US, specific rules seem to vary by state, quite widely.)
But, tidy as they are, battery cages are a horrible life for the hens. So, there’s an increasing movement to manage hens in other ways. Cage-free hens, free-range hens, etc. (Despite what it sounds like, free-range hens may never actually experience grass in their lives, and many never actually go outdoors… But that’s a different rant entirely.) We abide by an industry standard known as “pasture-raised”, which has no legal definition but to my knowledge nobody uses it on cartons unless they actually do. We dunno, but we’re happy to show anybody the actual pasture at any point, if they ask.
Anyhow– even when at total liberty, most chickens do prefer to lay their eggs somewhere sheltered, so if they have access to a nesting box or similar structure, they’ll preferentially lay their eggs there. Some prefer to lay them, say, under the wheel of the pasture unit, or something, but that’s all sort of inevitable.
You can still get nest boxes that have the kind of surface like they use in battery cages, so that when the hen lays an egg, it’ll roll out the back of the box so she won’t poop on it and it can be collected. Those are great, but they’re 1) expensive, and 2) don’t work if your building is a mobile pasture unit on wheels that might end up parked somewhere not exactly level. Like… our entire farm. (Sometimes I think there is not one level surface on this entire 175 acres. Including the damn oven.)
So we have regular nest boxes, and chickens are filthy dinosaurs and poop where they sleep, and also hens on pasture tend to get muddy feet when it’s rainy as hell all summer.
So… when we collect the eggs, they’re usually pretty grubby. It’s not absolutely disgusting, but it’s really not something most normal consumers are going to want in their kitchen.
So we have to wash them.
Some of our friends have bigger egg operations than we do, and consequently have expensive egg-washing machines. The outfit my sister and her husband used to work on back in Illinois had an egg-washing machine. Those are like, ten thousand dollars. Usually what they do is have a little conveyor belt that takes the egg through a spraydown, then some rotating little scrubby brushes, and then another rinse, and then out into a collection tray where you can either transfer them to a tray to dry, or package them directly into cartons.
We do not have the budget for an egg-washing machine, and we borrowed a less-fancy one earlier this year and discovered that it took two people to operate and was only slightly faster than one person washing– so, it was a little more than half as fast as two people washing. Womp-womp, we returned it to where we borrowed it and said no thanks; time is money. (Also, our hens tend to lay occasional super-jumbos, which the machine would accept and then crunch dramatically in the middle of washing, which was a huge disgusting mess, so…)
Sister and I have come up with a really fast method for washing, where you have to use your two hands completely autonomously but once you get the hang of it you can autopilot your way through and it’s okay. I can only do it if I spend for-goddamn-ever setting myself up, so I am not all that fast, but Sister can wash a ten-dozen-egg basket in about half an hour this way.
Our other major innovation of the last couple of years is that we bought some big bread racks, the plastic kind bakers use to transport fresh loaves. So we use those, and when we’ve filled them with wet eggs, we can stack them and keep working. It used to be that we could only wash as many eggs as we could fit on the counter, and then we’d have to stop and carton them, but now we can kind of just keep stacking.
The innovation of this year is that we discovered that cartoning the eggs slightly damp doesn’t make them stick to the carton. (Our friends who loaned us the egg machine pointed that out; we’d all been taught Never to Carton Wet Eggs OMG but that’s apparently not that big a deal.) We still try to dry them, because egg cartons are extremely not structurally sound when damp, but it’s not the end of the world.
Anyhow– that’s what I’m talking about, when I talk about washing eggs. We do ours in the room we also use as the clean room on chicken processing day– the state inspector told us that’s perfectly legal, we can use that room for other purposes, we just have to record what we do with it. And so we have a calendar on the back of the door and we write down every time we carton eggs, how many we cartoned, so we can present that as evidence of what we use that room for.
But it means that every other Monday all season, I have to take out all the egg-washing paraphernalia and put it away in the barn corridor and then clean the everliving daylights out of that room, and then every other Wednesday all season, I have to find where I put all the egg washing stuff (and all the eggs, meanwhile), and put it back.
(Your picture was not posted)
I was writing about something else, but I thought, you know, I should talk about washing eggs. It’s one of the farm chores I’ve spent a lot of time on, mostly because it’s unskilled and doesn’t require a great deal of strength or coordination, so literally anyone can do it, so I do it a lot.
Why do we wash eggs? Why is that a thing? Well, I’ll explain.
So most commercial egg facilities use battery cages for their hens, so the hens are stuck in a very small space and so when they lay an egg, it lands on a slanted surface and gently rolls away from the hen, so it can be collected easily. This means it doesn’t get soiled at all, and so I don’t know if commercial eggs get washed or not!
(I do know that in some countries, you are not allowed to wash eggs. In others, you are required to wash them. In the US, specific rules seem to vary by state, quite widely.)
But, tidy as they are, battery cages are a horrible life for the hens. So, there’s an increasing movement to manage hens in other ways. Cage-free hens, free-range hens, etc. (Despite what it sounds like, free-range hens may never actually experience grass in their lives, and many never actually go outdoors… But that’s a different rant entirely.) We abide by an industry standard known as “pasture-raised”, which has no legal definition but to my knowledge nobody uses it on cartons unless they actually do. We dunno, but we’re happy to show anybody the actual pasture at any point, if they ask.
Anyhow– even when at total liberty, most chickens do prefer to lay their eggs somewhere sheltered, so if they have access to a nesting box or similar structure, they’ll preferentially lay their eggs there. Some prefer to lay them, say, under the wheel of the pasture unit, or something, but that’s all sort of inevitable.
You can still get nest boxes that have the kind of surface like they use in battery cages, so that when the hen lays an egg, it’ll roll out the back of the box so she won’t poop on it and it can be collected. Those are great, but they’re 1) expensive, and 2) don’t work if your building is a mobile pasture unit on wheels that might end up parked somewhere not exactly level. Like… our entire farm. (Sometimes I think there is not one level surface on this entire 175 acres. Including the damn oven.)
So we have regular nest boxes, and chickens are filthy dinosaurs and poop where they sleep, and also hens on pasture tend to get muddy feet when it’s rainy as hell all summer.
So… when we collect the eggs, they’re usually pretty grubby. It’s not absolutely disgusting, but it’s really not something most normal consumers are going to want in their kitchen.
So we have to wash them.
Some of our friends have bigger egg operations than we do, and consequently have expensive egg-washing machines. The outfit my sister and her husband used to work on back in Illinois had an egg-washing machine. Those are like, ten thousand dollars. Usually what they do is have a little conveyor belt that takes the egg through a spraydown, then some rotating little scrubby brushes, and then another rinse, and then out into a collection tray where you can either transfer them to a tray to dry, or package them directly into cartons.
We do not have the budget for an egg-washing machine, and we borrowed a less-fancy one earlier this year and discovered that it took two people to operate and was only slightly faster than one person washing– so, it was a little more than half as fast as two people washing. Womp-womp, we returned it to where we borrowed it and said no thanks; time is money. (Also, our hens tend to lay occasional super-jumbos, which the machine would accept and then crunch dramatically in the middle of washing, which was a huge disgusting mess, so…)
Sister and I have come up with a really fast method for washing, where you have to use your two hands completely autonomously but once you get the hang of it you can autopilot your way through and it’s okay. I can only do it if I spend for-goddamn-ever setting myself up, so I am not all that fast, but Sister can wash a ten-dozen-egg basket in about half an hour this way.
Our other major innovation of the last couple of years is that we bought some big bread racks, the plastic kind bakers use to transport fresh loaves. So we use those, and when we’ve filled them with wet eggs, we can stack them and keep working. It used to be that we could only wash as many eggs as we could fit on the counter, and then we’d have to stop and carton them, but now we can kind of just keep stacking.
The innovation of this year is that we discovered that cartoning the eggs slightly damp doesn’t make them stick to the carton. (Our friends who loaned us the egg machine pointed that out; we’d all been taught Never to Carton Wet Eggs OMG but that’s apparently not that big a deal.) We still try to dry them, because egg cartons are extremely not structurally sound when damp, but it’s not the end of the world.
Anyhow– that’s what I’m talking about, when I talk about washing eggs. We do ours in the room we also use as the clean room on chicken processing day– the state inspector told us that’s perfectly legal, we can use that room for other purposes, we just have to record what we do with it. And so we have a calendar on the back of the door and we write down every time we carton eggs, how many we cartoned, so we can present that as evidence of what we use that room for.
But it means that every other Monday all season, I have to take out all the egg-washing paraphernalia and put it away in the barn corridor and then clean the everliving daylights out of that room, and then every other Wednesday all season, I have to find where I put all the egg washing stuff (and all the eggs, meanwhile), and put it back.
(Your picture was not posted)
