I thought I'd hit the hidden jackpot that saved the holiday baking season last November when I found a box of five dozens eggs for $16.68 at Walmart. Like everyone else we do a lot of homemade pumpkin pies, pumpkin bread, muffins, cupcakes and cookies for the holidays. So I figured five dozen should take care of our baking needs plus pass a few over to my other sons family. I went back after the holidays to see what the price of the same dozen eggs was and it has risen to almost twenty six bucks. Not that I needed that many eggs again but I had decided I was going to freeze eggs after having watched a few utube videos on how to freeze them. Of course I did a taste test first by freezing a couple. I definitely didn't want to freeze dozens of eggs to end up not wanting to eat them.
The taste test went well. I scrambled them up real good like advised. I guess that's the trick otherwise if the white of the egg isn't immersed really well into the yoke they taste rubbery. That part I had no clue about as I didn't try it to see if it was tolerable or not. I eat scrambled more often than fried and when it came to baking you usually end up lightly beating them as instructed but I guess an extreme beating would work just as well. At least that's what most the video seem to indicate you needed to do to incorporate the white really well into the yoke, stir until you don't see any clear part (white) floating around in the bowl and you have some bubbles floating around in there. All that though tiresome worked really well it was what came after that took a few batches to master.
I went down to a local store where I had seen eggs for two ninety nine a dozen. I bought five dozen eggs to start. After my first attempt, the point in the videos where they tell you to sit the eggs in warm water in a no no. Just a minute or two instructs most videos. You have about half your egg thawed sitting in the cupcake pan. They said it takes about four eggs to fill one cupcake slot. But in actuality they must have been using muffin pans as mine only got two to a slot. That was right to the tip top. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know...but I carried on trying to carry it to the refrigerator with them filled to the tippy top. So back to the table I went to wipe that mess off the top of the pan and off the floor. Once I had that cleared up it was back to the refrigerator...than back to the table to set them down as I wasn't going through that again cleaning up that mess trying to get the freezer door open while I held the pan level with one hand. Back to the freezer I went but by the time I got there the freezer door had swung back towards the opening so I decided to try use my head to bump it back open. So yeah it was back to the table to wipe that mess off the pan but I had been able to avert getting any to spill over the side onto the floor. I found something to prop open the freezer door with and finally the eggs were ready to freeze nesting atop the shelf in the freezer. A couple hours later I go down and check on the eggs, frozen solid. Time to remove from the pan, and I had decided, since this wasn't a cheap endeavor, to wrap each egg with plastic wrap first since I intended to continue on with this endeavor until I had at least a years worth of eggs frozen or the store started upping the price, whichever came first.
Like I said the warm water thing is a no no. It took me until about the third batch to finally figure that out. I don't know if you ever tried to get eggs out of a cupcake tin before but it's not that easy...at least if you listen to those on utube. Trying to get slippery ones out, wrapped and into freezer bags was a challenge. You sit there and look at the cupcake pan and you begin to wonder how much egg are you losing. To decipher this I got out a cake pan and dumped the egg that had melted into the cake pan than into a measuring up to pour back into the cupcake pan. One whole egg, or sixty two cents worth. So I decided to just dip them real quick like into the warm water...that also is a no no, there's just no simple way to get them out. By the time you're done your pans so warped you have to bend it back into shape. There's this one video where the lady says I use rubber muffin tray as they tend to come out much easier, as she then goes on to struggle trying to push them out from the underneath. Look like something she may have gotten from Tupper Ware. I wasn't real onto that idea as my mom had given me these rubber type egg shaped containers you could put a egg in, drop them in boiling water and come out with a perfect looking deviled egg. That's why I skipped on testing what would happen if you just broke an egg and put it in a tin because all those deviled eggs not only had a funky texture to them they had a rubber taste to them. Than finally it hit me, you know you really don't have to have warm water because the water out of the faucet is warmer than the eggs coming out of the freezer. That ended up working just perfectly. No you don't have to spray the pan with cooking spray or take oil and wipe around inside each cupcake cup, which I didn't try for long term shortage reasons, but nor a rubber type container so you can attempt to force them out of the tray, all you need to do is set them in cold water for a minute, remove, than take a knife and flip them right out of the pan. Almost all nearly ninety nine percent or better still frozen intact. Very little egg residue left in the pan.
Now I have myself a regular little assembly line going on freezing up these eggs. Whip the crap out of them, poor them in the cups slightly below the pan surface, prop open the freezer door, set inside, two hour later come down and get your plastic wrap preset out onto the table in a set of twelve, run some cold water in the sink, put the pan in for a minute or less, take out of the water, take a knife and pop them out, wrap than into the freezer bags. There's three dozen eggs to a freezer bag, I figure I am about half a years worth thus far but the manager down at that local store is catching onto me, he's raised the price twice now, once to three fifty a dozen and now three seventy nine. Will I beat him to the punch? Only time will tell.
I did though the other day happen upon a great deal at what they call a Daily Deals store here. You go there and they have an assortment of foods they must get from restaurant distributors or stores that right before the best by, end of season, overstock, or whatever reason they get a deal on it for and there were these boxes of bacon. They were precooked with a best by date of July 2023. I bought my son's girlfriend a box because she's nuts about bacon. It said each box had about four and half pounds of bacon in it. I really didn't think that was a whole lot at first but as a novelty type gift and the price being okay at eleven ninety nine I went ahead and got her one. She opened it up and there was thirty three individually bagged bacon slices, ten to a bag. They must have been for a restaurant the way they were bagged. You opened it like you would resealable bags but than it was also sealed shut on the inside once you got the resealable part open, you had to take scissors or a knife and open the bag in the inside also...than I thought maybe because that was so odd it was a packaging mishaps as to why they got a special buy on them at daily deals. She gave me a bag to try and within a couple days I was back out there buying two more boxes. I thought I'd get her another box as she says the kids keep sneaking her bacon and I got another for here, the kids love when I get up on the weekend and make them a big breakfast of pancakes, cheesy eggs, toast, sausage or bacon. Plus there's enough there to make a couple BLT dinners. When you think about it you buy a twelve ounce bacon at five to six bucks has about that many slices, and with inflation thirty three bags with ten pieces of precooked bacon for eleven ninety nine isn't bad at all.
