One of the big things that people like to do in the garden is bury stuff in it. One of the most popular things to bury are eggs.
Why Eggs?
Here is the thing. Eggs are pretty easy to get. They have a surprising amount of nutrients and mineral contained in them. Finally, they are cheap so easy to throw away.
I don’t know if this is actually an effective thing. It certain to help since it will breakdown into stuff to feed the soil.
This is big for tomato growers and seeing as my soil is total garbage this year, I am giving it a go.
What Could Go Wrong?
Well, here is the thing about eggs. When I was a kid, eggs were going to kill you. It wasn’t just the expert opinions of our elites. It was actually pathogens that slipped into the supply chain. There are lots of things but I believe several of them are soil born. So you bury the 1 in 20,000 or whatever it is then you insert into your garden bad things.
Now maybe the environment kills off all the bad things. I doubt it but I see no evidence either way. In order to do this safely then I need to pasteurize the eggs.
How to Pasteurize Eggs
First, a Sous Vide is a miracle machine. If you love meat, you should own one. If you like raw egg dishes, you need a sous vide. It is a device that maintains a steady temperature. One of the things you can do is pasteurize eggs.
Before we start this is not my recipe. This is not my technique. If you want to learn from the people who made my machine.
If you want to follow along with my thoughts then continue on but I am doing what they instruct.
Step 1
Fill your container with water.
Get your eggs out. I am building from multiple crates so there are some extra color in my eggs.
Set the temp to 135 F that is 57.2 in Celsius. A nice odd number.
Finally drop your eggs into the container. I read this twice but that is what they say. So they went in the pool.
Set the timer to 1:15. That’s an hour and 15 minutes. It will make a bunch of really unnerving noise.
Now here is something that happened. All that banging around actually cracked the shell of one of my eggs. Not the inner sac attached to the shell but the shell itself. I have to clean my sous vide. Just a warning that your supermarket commodity eggs might not have the shell strength of your free range, organic, steroid free, antibiotic free, bug eating, sunshine getting, superior generic, super chicken elite so just know you might have to clean stuff.
Get your spider, spoon or strainer spoon thing from the Asian supermarket. I love this thing.
After the timer goes off, take you spoon thingy and pull the eggs out and drop them in ice water.
Let them chill down to the core.
After that you are good to use them in your garden knowing that your salmonellae infection your get from your lettuce did not come from these eggs.
Next time we will use them to plant some tomatoes in absolutely garbage soil.