Why Europeans Don't Refrigerate Eggs but Americans Do
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
She also calls tomato sauce 'gravy', and considers bread to be a main course.
In Japan, eggs are washed and are generally not refrigerated, even though articles like this will often say they are.
In Denmark eggs are always found in the refrigerator in super markets and you often see feathers and other dirt on the egg shells, so they aren’t washed to any useful degree.
So the cause and effect between washing and refrigeration is not globally recognized.
Last year we got a flock of chickens. They are happy, free-range, and "expensive". But we have loads of eggs and constantly give them away. We've seen everyone immediately wash and refrigerate them, regardless. It's just what people are used to.
We give away the "pretty" eggs. Mine, I pick off the hay and scrub off dried poop before cracking. Even so there really is no comparison between the bland, bleach-white eggs at the supermarket and organic ones grown from happy chickens with a balanced diet.
There was a good writeup in serious eats and they found that in blind taste tests, no one could tell the difference. But when people could see what they were eating, they preferred the fresh eggs because they tended to have brighter orange yolks.
Putting a bit of orange food coloring in the store bought eggs effectively squashed the difference.
So it's safer (from European point of view) to never cool them on supply chain but after bringing them home put them in the fridge and take them out immediately before eating when condensation is not a problem anymore.
They obviously last longer in the fridge than out of it. But since they are sold quickly it's not worth to refrigerate them before they are in the hands of consumers.
So eggs in a supermarket are just doing what they are programmed to do; no problem. But when moved to home there is a problem. Eggs in a sunny kitchen could activate.
Cracking some eggs a week later to find several dead chicken embryos is disgusting. Keeping them in the fridge will avoid this problem.
Commercial egg-laying hens aren’t going to be let anywhere near a rooster, so you’re not going to get fertilised eggs from the store.
But… unless they’ve been incubated, the only difference is a white spot in the yolk.
If you get eggs from a recreational / family farm, you may well get a bunch of fertilised eggs — you wouldn’t notice unless you knew what to look for.
That's why it's rather obvious when they are fertilised. Because you actually will often have to consciously go out of your way to ask for fertilised eggs, usually specifically for chicken breeding purposes.
Sorry for that I could have made it more obvious. Haha.
> None of the eggs you can buy at the store are fertilized.
We were talking about a tradition that was created in the middle of the last century, when home fridges started to include egg trays, and supermarkets were (probably) a little different than today.
Yes, I can inform you that you can definitely buy organic fertilized eggs in many places, at least in Europe.
And if you think that we never studied embryology and sexual reproduction in the faculty of biology and that I did my thesis in animal reproduction without knowing what is an ovule and what is a spermatozoa... well, you have a really weird sense of the reality. I would not buy anything "demonstrated by you" at this moment.
By the way, my rooster send you a salute.
Same here (Italy). It might be due to them having a relatively long conservation life compared to other food. They stay no more than 4-5 days at ambient (albeit cooled) temperature at the store, but their marked life is usually about 2 weeks. Fresh natural eggs, those we sometimes get from relatives who have a farm in the south, last a lot more, often well exceeding 3 weeks after travelling over 500 km by car.
In some european countries refrigerate eggs too. Without washing.
One important thing to note (which is mentioned in the article) is that once eggs have been refrigerated you need to keep them refrigerated, because the warming up after refrigeration makes the shell more permeable thus increasing the chance of salmonella entering the egg.
Most eggs are stored in the fridge, because it happens to have egg trays, although more recent models tend to omit those. Those folks I know without egg trays usually store boxes in the fridge.
The eggs I'm likely to use are stored outside the fridge, being moved from fridge to outside as and when the external supply reduces. These can stay they for a week or two.
I suspect we actually washed our eggs prior to joining the EEC, and hence how we 'traditionally' had egg trays in the fridges. Now that we've left the EU, I can't see any reason to change the current practice, so imagine the current don't need to refrigerate, and forbidding washing approach will continue.
As evidenced by a lot of comments here and my own experience in an Eastern European country.
It does say on the box though to refrigerate after purchase so i have no idea... WWhy is my house different to shop?
Edit: in stores I’d say it’s 50/50 if they’re refrigerated or not
We buy our eggs off a shelf at the supermarket (not refrigerated) and the carton gets thrown in the pantry or left on the bench at home. No issues with egg longevity.
Only rotten eggs we’ve found were in the garden from our chickens — could’ve been there for many many months. That’s a smell you never forget.