Am…musings

Ever wondered how to tell if an egg is bad? When I started making Christmas cookies years ago, I worried about ruining a half-made batch by cracking a bad egg into it. Of course, you can crack eggs into a separate dish, but who wants more dishes to wash?

Somewhere along the line I learned a cool trick: place an egg in a cup of water … if it floats, it’s rotten. Today I was making an omelet and knew my eggs were past their prime so I did the test and found a floater …

Here’s a good explanation of why it happens from What’s Cooking America:
Old eggs float in fresh cold water because of a large air cell that forms as the egg cools after being laid. As the egg ages, air enters the egg and the air cell becomes larger and this acts as a buoyancy aid. Generally, fresh eggs will lie on the bottom of the bowl of water. Eggs that tilt so that the large end is up are older, and eggs that float are rotten. The tilting is caused by air pockets in the eggs that increase in size over time as fluid evaporates through the porous shell and oxygen and gases filter in. The older an egg gets the more gas builds up inside it. More gas = more floating!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.