How to Tell If Your Eggs Are Fresh

If you break open a bad egg, you can fill your house with a stench that can last for days, yet in this time of tightening budgets, no one wants to throw away good food. How can we tell if the eggs are still good and safe to eat? Whether you've got a carton of eggs that were in the back of your refrigerator or your chickens hid a nest of eggs from you, trying to figure out if the eggs are still fresh is very simple.

Things You'll Need

• Eggs you're not sure about
• A big bowl
• Water
• A plate

Instructions

1. 

   Smell the eggs through the shell.

   If the egg smells really rotten through the shell, don't crack it open and carefully dispose of it in the trash outside. Really rotten eggs can easily burst just by a gentle touch and you do not want a potential bomb sitting inside your house.

   If the egg smells a little bad, decide if the smell came from a stinky refrigerator or if it is the smell of an egg gone bad. If the egg smells bad because it's bad, throw it away. If you think it smells because it was sitting next to that stinky garlic in your fridge or it doesn't smell bad at all, try the next test.

2. 

   Check and see if the eggs float.

   Fill the bowl with water and gently set an egg inside. If the egg sinks straight to the bottom, it is fresh and fine to eat. It the egg pops right to the surface of the water, it's too old to eat. Most eggs will be somewhere in the middle. Those that are still touching the bottom of the bowl, but sort of floating, are okay, as are eggs that are in the lower third of the bowl. Anything over floating higher than that is very suspect and probably should be tossed.

   The reason this works is because eggshells are covered in pores that allow air in and out of the egg. Since the shells are so porous, as eggs get older, the insides dry up and get lighter and the eggs start to float.

3. 

   Look closely at the egg.

   Crack the egg open onto the plate and look at it carefully. As eggs age, their yolks get dull and their whites less cohesive, so an egg that is dull with a very loose white is probably fairly old and won't cook up well.

   For eggs over easy, you want a nice, dark and sturdy yolk and a white that won't flow all over the pan. For baking you want at least a pretty fresh egg that will plump in the baked goods won't leave your cakes flat. Most other things work fine with slightly older eggs and hard boiled eggs actually peel much better if the eggs aren't fresh.

Tips & Warnings

• Check out my article on keeping eggs longer, so you don't have this problem the next time you get too many eggs to eat quickly.

Resources

• Keep Eggs Fresh Longer