My birds lay more than fifty eggs each day, currently. I only want to sell the perfect ones, so that’s about half of them. What to do with the extra eggs? Store them for the “extra” months of the year – the months that are too dark and cold to want to think about, when the quail aren’t laying.
Most households don’t own industrial food preservation equipment. It’s not safe to can or dry eggs with regular home food preservation tools. I’ve looked at storing eggs in a bucket of brine, but that doesn’t seem like a long enough term solution to me. Pickled eggs are tasty, but even they must be refrigerated, if processed at home.
That leaves freezing. Since there aren’t enough hours in a day for me to finish half of my to-do list, I go for the no-fuss method of cracking the eggs into a pan, freezing them into that shape, and then bagging them in freezer bags for the chest freezer.
I found silicone mini muffin pans at Wal-Mart. They are the perfect size for individual quail eggs, but if you like to scramble eggs for freezing, each cup could hold more than one egg. These pans make it super easy to pop the eggs out after they’ve frozen for a bit. I cover them with three layers of cling wrap, each going a different direction. That’s to avoid ice crystals.
They fry up nicely. I put the frozen eggs into a pan, and they do hold the proper shape. I don’t have any problem with the yolks, doing it this way, although some might find them a bit on the dry side. In this photo, they don’t have pepper yet, which is a crime.
The eggs in the picture were frozen for three months. Frozen eggs could be thawed and used for baking, scramble or in most other ways.
Currently, the FDA says it’s safe to keep frozen eggs for up to a year. So the months of wishing for some eggs while eating overnight oats don’t have to be a thing.
