My Egg Storage With Mineral Oil Saga Starts This Week!

eggs-mineral-oil-1I finally found a bottle of mineral oil at my local Walmart. I had been looking for the better part of month at Walmart and Target without any luck. I was beginning to wonder if everyone else had the same idea in mind, though, that’s probably not the case. 😉

Anyway, if you’re unaware, the idea is to coat eggs with mineral oil to act as a replacement for the bloom that normally protects eggs from bacteria when they’re laid. In so doing, you can then store eggs at room temperature, you know… not in the fridge. Store-bought eggs are washed before packaged and, therefore, do not have the bloom.

Fortunately, the process is quite simple. Here’s what I did:

1. I put on some latex gloves and poured about half the bottle of mineral oil in a bowl (I didn’t end up using that much so next time maybe 1/3 of the bottle). Then one-by-one I coated each egg from one 18-egg carton.

eggs-mineral-oil-2

2. I let the eggs drip off any excess oil for several seconds so that they were less likely to puddle in the carton. I have no idea if this was necessary or not but it seemed like a good idea to me. When finished dripping I replaced each egg to the carton.

eggs-mineral-oil-3

3. Here’s what the eggs coated with mineral oil look like. There’s an obvious sheen to them if the picture isn’t that clear.

eggs-mineral-oil-4

4. I then marked one egg container with the words “mineral oil” and the other as “control”–I’m feeling a bit nerdy right now–so that I would know which was which. And finally I placed the cartons in an old plastic drawer to contain them for whenever they went bad and spoiled.

eggs-mineral-oil-5

The plan is to check an egg from each carton each week (probably on the weekends) to see if they’ve gone bad yet. If they last that long this will be a 4.5 month experiment because each carton contains 18 eggs.

As for how to check them, I think I will start by placing an egg from each carton in a bowl of water to see if they float or not–floating is bad–and maybe, just maybe I’ll eat it if the mineral oil eggs don’t float. My wife has already emphatically stated that she would NOT be consuming these eggs! Where’s her spirit of adventure. 😉

You know, it is a bit weird to not place these eggs in the refrigerator. I kind of feel like I just put my shoes on backwards or maybe forgot my pants. We’ll see how it goes… wish me luck!


Posted

in

by

My latest book, The Survival Blueprint: How to Prepare Your Family for Disaster, can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJ49Y5X4

Comments

8 responses to “My Egg Storage With Mineral Oil Saga Starts This Week!”

  1. Kevin

    Hi how did this experiment turn out? Can you provide any details on how the following criteria:

    – Store bought vs homegrown (bloom still on egg)
    – Fridge vs cool dark place in house
    – Time the above varieties vs control eggs went bad?

    Thanks, I think lots of us are food prepping right now, so it would be great to hear from you

    1. I did post about the results over the course of a few months, but those posts are no longer available due to a mistake I made years ago deleting old posts. In any case, I didn’t use homegrown eggs, only store-bought and kept all of the eggs in a basement which was about room temperature. If I remember right, the eggs with mineral oil lasted until about the end of the experiment (two or three months at least) and even the control eggs (the ones without mineral oil) were fine for several weeks using the egg dropped in water test. I believe I even ate them for a while! Eventually, I no longer trusted the control eggs… but the mineral oil eggs were fine.

  2. Dinah

    You should try the experiment with water glass too.

    1. I think I’ll stick with one experiment at a time!

  3. Francis

    I conducted a test of home grown fresh eggs myself, but did not coat them with oil. I just wanted to see how our OLD home grown compared to so called FRESH store bought.
    I did not wash the eggs before placing them in the fridge, as washing them removes the Hens natural coating that God has provided as a preservative. I started checking eggs after a month and found the yoke AND the whites still stood up in the frying pan after 4 months. That 4 month test was all I needed to tell me that store eggs are not that fresh. I think if one has fresh unwashed eggs with the oil coating, as you describe, the eggs would last a very very long time if refrigerated.

    1. The point is to test how well they store outside of the fridge but I do agree that home grown eggs are no doubt better for a variety of reasons. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

  4. comingstorm

    It works.
    Had a carton last 6 months during 1 test(used all the eggs therefore test was concluded early).
    Did have some that I had coated AND had put in the fridge.
    They were still good after almost a year.
    Some separation will occur inside the egg, but it’s still good.

    1. That’s good to know and very encouraging. What I’m really interested in is how fast the control group goes bad as compared to the mineral oil group.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *