How to Blow out an Egg

How to Blow out an Egg

How to Blow out an Egg

Because you really don’t need that many hard-boiled eggs.

The best reason to blow out eggs before decorating them for Easter is so that you’ll have eggs that are NOT hard-boiled. Yeah, they’re scrambled, but scrambled eggs are way more versatile in the kitchen than hard-boiled eggs are.

But useful as the absence of four dozen hard-boiled eggs is to my kitchen every Easter, that’s not my favorite reason for blowing out eggs before we decorate them.

My favorite reason is that I genuinely like to preserve our Easter eggs.

Not all of them, mind  you–a person needs four dozen delicate heirlooms every Easter about as much as she needs four dozen hard-boiled eggs–but a few. The special ones. The egg that the baby first dyed all by herself. The egg that the preschooler drew a self-portrait on. The egg that I tried a new technique on, and it turned out really, really well.

You know what the real heirlooms are.

Blowing out eggs is simple and easy enough that you can do a bunch all at once, or you can do as I do and blow them out a few at a time, over the course of a month or so. We get two eggs most days from our pet hens, so I generally do just a few when I’ve got them (in the photos for this tute, I’ve blown out five, while listening to “Morning Edition” and waiting for the kids to finish breakfast), use up the eggs, and then do a few more.

Here’s how:

1. Wash your eggs. You’re going to be putting your mouth on these eggs, and as much as I love Fluffball and Arrow, I really don’t want to have the taste of their butts in my mouth.

How to Blow out Eggs2. Poke a small hole in the top of the egg. Do you have an awl? You need an awl, and not just for egg blowing–I use mine all the time. Anyway, with your awl (or, fine, a needle if you don’t have an awl. Surely you have a needle?!?), poke a small hole, just the width of the awl, in the tip-top of the egg.

Hold the egg firmly in your non-dominant hand when you do this, and if for some reason the egg cracks (I always lose a couple), just break it into the jar where you’ll be blowing your eggs and move on. Life’s too short to fuss over a cracked egg.

3. Poke a larger hole in the bottom of the egg. Do this by first poking another hole just as you did in the top of the egg, but then delicately picking away at that hole with the point of your awl until it’s a max of 2cm wide. The wider the bottom hole, the easier it will be to blow out the egg.

In another tute on another day, I’ll show you how to block that hole for fancy egg dyeing.

4. Scramble the egg. Poke the awl back into the egg, and swim it around until the egg inside is good and scrambled.

How to Blow out an Egg5. Blow out the egg. Position the egg over the jar that you’ll be using to hold the scrambled, raw egg, with the larger hole facing down. Blow into the small hole, and raw egg will be forced out of the larger hole in the bottom. Blow out the entire contents into the jar, then rinse the egg again and set it in a small pot.

Repeat for each egg.

6. Boil the eggs. Fill the pot with water, then hold down the eggs until they’re at least partially filled with water, and therefore at least partially immersed. Set the pot to boil, and as it does, occasionally turn the eggs, hold them under the boiling water some more, and generally just fuss with them until the raw egg is rinsed away and they’re sanitized.

7. Air dry. Place the eggs in a cardboard egg carton to drain.

Once they’re clean and dry, the eggs are shelf stable and ready to use. Dye them conventionally, decoupage them, draw on them, or do your pysanky–they’re all set!

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