remain wholesome for well beyond this 45-day period—60
to 70 days is reasonable.
While it’s possible that the eggs you’re buying were laid
within a few days of their pack date, manufacturers have up
to 30 days to clean and pack eggs, which means that, in
theory, if you buy a carton of eggs on its expiration date, it
may already be 75 days old! Clearly, checking the
expiration date is not the most reliable way to guarantee
fresh eggs. You’re much better off checking the pack date.
Q: What if I buy eggs without a pack date or I’ve
transferred the eggs to the egg compartment in my
refrigerator door and no longer know the date?
First off, everyone tells you that if you want to maximize
shelf life, you should get those eggs out of the fridge door
and into the coldest part of your fridge. True. But what they
fail to tell you is that even on a shelf in the door, eggs will
last for several weeks beyond their pack date. So unless you
eat or cook with eggs only on very rare occasions, go ahead
and keep them in the door. You’ll use ’em up long before
they go bad.
That said, there’s a quick and easy test to gauge the
freshness of an egg: just drop it into a bowl of water.
Eggshells are porous: they can lose about 4 microliters of
water a day to evaporation while simultaneously taking air
into the space between the shell and the inner membrane
near the fat end. In very fresh eggs, the air space is tiny and
the egg will sink to the bottom of the bowl and lie on its
side. As eggs get older, the air space will grow, so old eggs
will sink and then stand on their points as the air in the