Eggs – Are these eggs rotten

This is probably not what you want to hear on any front, but it is best to store your eggs in their shell. Their original carton provides an ideal container.

If you do want to store them peeled, the standard way to do it is refrigerated in a bowl of water (changed daily). Of course, you will then have to dry the egg before eating it the wetness bothers you. This method is also used with poached eggs.

Lastly, you can do what you are already doing, and store them with some towels, but they will probably express some water.

The eggs should be good for about one week, unpeeled. The Egg Board recommends they be eaten the same day they are peeled, but other sources indicate up to about 5 days.

See also:

• Still Tasty
• Eat By Date

It is normal that eggs smell of eggs, yes. Some people are just more sensitive to certain smells than others and detect them in smaller amounts, and sometimes all people perceive a smell with equal strength, but a few will have a negative reaction to a smell commonly regarded as pleasant.

If you react with unusual aversion to the smell of baked eggs, there is nothing you can do about it. If you are indeed using standard recipes from widespread books, they probably smell OK to the general public.

There is no way to remove the smell of eggs. But you can do two things:

• avoid overcooking the eggs. When somebody finds the eggs smell unpleasant, they are usually reacting to the sulfur compounds egg proteins form under high temperatures. This is not a universal solution, because a properly baked cake has been exposed to temperatures high enough to form lots of these compounds. But in dishes which can be overcooked, such as custards or boiled eggs, less cooking is usually much better smellwise.
• choose recipes with less eggs. This will mean that you will have to restrict your cake eating habits a lot. Genoise is probably completely out of the question, but if your sensitivity also shows at pound cake and similar, then there aren't many traditional types you can bake. It is possible that whites-only or yolks-only cake types won't trigger your problem, but if both do, you will possibly have to start replacing some egg in normal recipes. Sadly, eggs are very important for the texture of a cake, which means that substitutes only work in certain types of cake (pound cake, sponge cake) and even then, the larger the proportion of substitute to egg, the worse the final texture. But it may be worth it, if it lets you enjoy cakes you wouldn't eat when made with eggs.

Update after comment

If you don't smell this in bakery cakes, there are still a few possible explanations:

• the sensitivity theory is right, and the bakeries in your area rely on some kind of product different than fresh eggs, such as powdered eggs. The processing used in industry ingredients could change eggs in some way which removes the components which cause your sensitivity. This should be easy to test: if you can eat homemade cake with fresh eggs, it is not the cause.
• the smell compound to which you react could be something entirely different from the sulfur compounds always present in eggs. You said that you are buying fresh farm eggs. But the point is that fresh heirloom products are normally much more chemically diverse than mass-produced food. It is especially noticeable in fruit and vegetables, but I guess that chickens held under less-than-optimal conditions and fed standardized food mix will produce eggs which have much less exotic trace compounds than those of chickens raised on small farms under sunlight. You could try baking with the cheapest supermarket eggs and see if this solves the problem for you.
• maybe my sensitivity theory is completely wrong, and you are indeed doing something unusual to the cake. As mentioned above, overcooking is a suspect. If your oven is hotter than the dial shows (very common), you may be consistently overcooking every single cake. Try inserting a roasting thermometer into your cake and yanking it out as soon as it reaches 90 Celsius. It might have a slightly floury taste, but at least you will know if it is the smell of overcooked egg or something else which bothers you.