What's the best way to tell if eggs are fresh when you don't have access to a glass of water (I.e at farmers market)? The teaching has been eggs from the farmers market are fresher than those at the store. I recently hard boiled eggs from both the farmers market and the store. The farmers market eggs had a big air pocket at the bottom ( conveniently making them easier to peel). I was always told that this is a sign they are not as fresh. I fed my baby the ones from the store instead.
Eggs – Egg freshness–stale eggs at market
eggs
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Best Answer
I used to raise chickens for fun...hundreds of them over the years, and processed many thousands of eggs (considering my biggest 'haul' in one day was 227 eggs, I feel safe to say thousands.)
There were methods based on where an egg floated in a temperature gradient bath, etc., but the most reliable (to me) was what you saw when you cracked it open. A fresh egg should have a rounded yolk domed well above a second domed albumin structure; the third level is a cohesive flatter mass of albumin. Buy an egg and crack it. If it's fresh, it will look like the picture. If it doesn't, it's not fresh (the color of the yolk is not an indication of freshness. It varies by the feed.)
Above, there are three distinct "layers" to a fresh egg. As the egg ages, these distinctions fail in degrees every day.
This is a fresh egg next to an older egg.
A hard boiled fresh egg is very hard to peel when boiled; you wind up tearing chunks of egg white with the shell. We would wait about a week before trying to hard boil them.