Preserving chicken eggs through liming is not unusual, but preserving DUCK eggs is! Why? Ducks lay their eggs on the ground, rather than in nesting boxes. That tends to make for a dirty egg. And the cardinal rule of liming eggs is: they cannot be washed and need to be perfectly clean, and the fresher the better.
I have been experimenting with liming duck eggs that are less than perfectly clean. And let me tell you, the yolks on the slightly dirty duck eggs kept their shape much longer than the clean as could be chicken eggs that I limed at the same time.
The duck eggs yolks remain firm and intact a lot longer that the chicken egg yolks in my experiment. See photo. They look nearly as good as fresh duck eggs, though they had been on my shelf for almost an entire year.
The Recipe For Liming Duck Eggs
Liming duck eggs follows the same formula as liming chicken eggs. You simply mix 1 ounce (2 heaping tablespoons) of pickling lime for every quart of water that you use.
I usually use a 2 quart mason jar. That is large enough to fit about a dozen duck eggs. I mix one quart of water and 2 TBSPs of pickling lime in the jar first. Then I add the eggs over the course of 1-3 days. It is fine to add them as fast or slowly as you can harvest them.
Just make sure that the eggs are: very freshly laid, carefully placed in the jar to avoid cracking (see trouble shooting section), NOT washed, and fully submerged under the liquid solution.
Important Tips and Tricks for Preserving Eggs
I recommend using a clear glass jar so that you can see when any of your limed chicken or duck eggs is starting to go bad. That way you can use the rest of the eggs before the one baddie spoils the rest of them. As the photo above shows, if one of the eggs has gone bad your jar of eggs will start to look hazy. All is not lost! Bring the jar to your kitchen sink and start rinsing off each of the eggs. You’ll quickly discover which one has a crack. Throw that one out and make one of my family’s favorite “Recipes for Using a LOT of Eggs” to use up the rest of the eggs right away.
Trouble shooting: Why might an egg go bad in the liming jar?
If you followed the cardinal rule of liming: Fresh, UNwashed, (fairly) clean, and carefully submerged in the jar.
Then the most likely problem is that one of the eggs had a hairline crack from some event on its journey from the barnyard into your jar of liming solution. It is easy to tell which one has the problem when you take the eggs out of the jar. If you examine each egg, you will find a white line of calcium collecting along the tiny crack in the egg that is causing problems.
