Why do people put eggs in the fridge ?
I have suffered two migraine attacks in my life, one of them during Prof Ward’s lecture on eggs!
It had always struck me as strange that eggs in supermarkets seem quite happy stored at ambient temperatures whilst as soon as you get them home you are advised that they should be kept in the fridge.
Microbiologists will mostly advise keeping eggs in the fridge (and in a pretty low temperature fridge) whilst chefs and food purists might prefer ambient storage. The microbiologists are mostly concerned about salmonella and campylobacter which don’t particularly like fridge temperatures. UK eggs should normally be salmonella and campylobacter free but …..
Eggs naturally contain ‘anti nutritional factors’ which inhibit protein digestion and bind some vitamins and minerals. For this reason, as well as microbiological concerns, eating raw eggs is not recommended. However these anti nutritional factors do protect the egg from some microbial deterioration and are ‘designed’ to work at ambient temperatures.
Egg quality deteriorates with time, so old eggs will not perform as well in, say, meringues or cakes as fresh eggs. There is a test for ‘egg freshness’ called the Haugh Test which measures how high an egg cracked onto a plate sits (as Michael Caine might say “Not many people know that!”)
Bottom line, in my view, eggs should always be eaten cooked and it is best to use them fresh rather than storing them for very long. If you are not going to store eggs for very long then ambient storage is probably OK, but if you are storing them for longer periods then the fridge is probably the safest option. And they say rocket science is complex.