Freezing eggs

Usually I am busy doing this in the spring when the hens are laying like gangbusters, but this has been a strange year and I'm not on any right kind of a schedule.....so we wing it and do things when we get to them.   Getting to the eggs was a must by yesterday.  The hens have molted and now they're laying like crazy...and this lay rate won't last during the dead of winter (which is when we need a lot of eggs for Christmas baking!)

This is not a hard project by any means...but there are many steps.  The first and most important step is to be sure you are only freezing fresh eggs.  You never know when an egg is going to slip through and sit in the fridge for weeks...and those are not the ones you want to use for freezing.  Testing an eggs' age is easy to do...Fill a clear glass container with cool water.  Gently set an egg into the water.  A really fresh egg will lay down on it's side.  As the egg gets older, the air cell expands.....so an old egg will float on one end. (If it floats off the bottom of the container get rid of it quick!) 

Here's an example of a good egg:

and here's a bad egg:

Once you know you have a stack of good eggs to freeze...you need your equipment....I can not stress enough the non-stick spray enough!

Spray each spot on the trays.  I use standard ice cube trays and muffin pans.  The ice cube trays will hold about 7 eggs each...2 cubes = 1 egg.  Mix the eggs THOROUGHLY....you really need to emulsify the yolk and white together.  Then spray your trays and pour the eggs in....

When they are frozen solid, you can pop them out pretty easily from the plastic trays...to get them out of the metal tins, flip the tin over and rub it for a minute with your hand.  That will soften the edges enough so they slip right out...

Then I put 6 cubes in a bag and vac seal them.  I have found that most recipes call for 3 eggs, so this number works for us. 

For the disks, I put 2 in each package...so it's 4 eggs.  An extra egg in a cookie recipe doesn't hurt...and if we're making scrambled eggs we usually do 4.

Just be sure to mark the package with the correct number of eggs per cube or disk.  And don't forget the date.  I have used these after being in the freezer for a year with no change in quality.  Once I get a bunch of these packs made up, I put them in a clear plastic shoebox in the freezer so I can find them quickly and I know how many I still have.  4-5 dozen will usually get us through the "dry" times of winter.