I just got back from a trip to England and was somewhat dismayed to notice that they do not refirgerate eggs in any store that I was in.
Does anybody know why we refrigerate eggs in our stores and the Brits don’t?
not just England; I noticed the same thing in France. I wasn’t dismayed by it; quite the reverse, as I assumed that if they didn’t refrigerate them, it meant that they had shorter supply chains and the eggs were reliably fresh.
I don’t know how true it is, but I’ve been told that keeping eggs chilled doesn’t actually help preserve them.
It’s possible it’s done in the USA for the perception that it helps, or maybe to make sure the odd fertilised egg didn’t hatch in the days of yore?
The received information is that eggs cook better and mix better when at room temperature and they keep “long enough” out of the chiller. So my dad maintained who was a chef. Also the porous shell was lass likely to take up “fridge smells”
A small aside i’m told virtually all eggs sold in USA are white while almost all ours are brown is that true?
We Americans have a strong desire for keeping things really cold. Anyway refrigerated eggs last about 8 weeks while unrefrigerated last 5 weeks so there is an element of preservation but most people go through eggs too fast for it to matter.
I’ve noticed that the room-temperature brown eggs in Europe have a whole lot more flavor than the refrigerated white ones in the U.S.
YMMV. In my experience, refrigerated eggs can last for months.
In my experience, it’s pretty common not to refridgerate egss in lots of countries. It seems like the US might be the in the minority.
I don’t know. Pop culture never shows brown eggs. And I’ve never seen them outside of New England. But in New England, there are more browns than whites. And most whites can be gotten at national chains like 7-11.
They’re not refrigerated in the Tops Supermarket near us here in Bangkok. Since we normally don’t cook, I may not have noticed this if I hadn’t had to pick up some eggs for a new pancake mix we bought recently. But there they were in the aisle, stacks and stacks of them. No doubt it’s likewise elsewhere in the country.
I’m in NE also and a (lifetime-local) co-worker once asked “How do they get white eggs? Do they dye them?”
Um, it actually is a food safety issue, folks.
Raw eggs, it is true, will last a long time unrefrigerated, if their shells remain intact.
The problem in the USA, is that salmonella bacteria is rampant in our poultry and egg supply. My understanding is that this is NOT the case in other countries.
So it is simply not as safe to leave eggs in the USA unrefrigerated, since the chance that the eggs are contaminated with salmonella–and that they will proliferate at room temperature–is quite high. If you are in a place where salmonella is not quite as much of a problem in the poultry population, then the risks are much lower.
I think in the Uk brown are seen as more natural, to the extent i remember my mum boiling eggs for us kids with a dash of coffee to make the shells go brown!
Salmonella wise there was a 1980s huge thing about it with lead to mass chicken murder and new egg regulations and tests and markings on eggs for date to use etc.
It’s just down to the breed of chicken. In the UK, the vast majority of our eggs are brown, coming from chickens with brown (ish) feathers.
I can taste the difference between brown and white eggs as long as I know what color they were to start with. If I don’t know what color they were, they taste the same. I wonder why that is?
The US is definitely unusual in refrigerating eggs. Here in Panama eggs are kept on unrefrigerated shelves in stores. Most eggs are brown. I keep them in the refrigerator after I get them home, but have never had a problem with eggs going bad.
The issue with eggs is that they contain liquid and they are porous.
If you take cold eggs out the fridge they will accumulate condensation, which may be drawn into the egg carrying pathogenic contamination.
The crucial thing is not really the absolute temperature, so much as the relative temperature compared to the environment. The aim is to try not to cause any sudden temperate change.
All UK produced eggs come from vaccinated hens, and these can be identified by the ‘Lion’ brand mark, this is a requirement of UK legislation - we had a significant poultry industry scare some years ago and confidence was seriously damaged, which in turn seriously damaged that industry. We already had enough issues with BSE and we really didn’t need further problems.
Do you remember a jingle that went like this? “Brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh.”
They’re still saying that on commericals around here.
No that is not true. There are equally as many brown eggs as there are white. And there is no difference between the two colors.
This is you psyching yourself out… there is no difference in taste between brown or white. To prove it you have to taste without knowing the color, otherwise you are really only convincing yourself otherwise because you saw the color first.
A very noticeable difference of unrefrigerated eggs how much the egg white spreads out in a pan when frying. Makes for a nice crispy edge when fried in hot olive oil.