Cooking hacks are one of the most consumed content on TikTok. And, among them, the one with frozen eggs has been accumulating thousands of views for months. Basically, it consists of freezing an egg overnight, leaving it under hot tap water for a few seconds and peeling it. Then, it is cut into slices and cooked in the pan to obtain fake quail eggs.
Easy and useful, right? Well, better not to, because food safety experts say that it could put your health at risk. This is so because when you freeze an egg in the shell, the volume of the white and yolk increases, and it can crack. These gaps give free rein to microorganisms to contaminate the egg and intoxicate you when you eat it.
In the event that the egg does not crack even a bit, which is unlikely, this trick presents another danger: as we have already explained, one of the steps is to leave it under the tap to thaw a little so that you can cut it without effort. But washing this food is not recommended because the water allows, again, germs to access its interior. This happens because the shell is very porous and the pressure of the water makes it easier for external agents to enter.
In the event that the egg is dirty with remains of feces and we want to clean it, it is best to store it refrigerated and unwashed and in containers that avoid contact with other products in the fridge, explains Beatriz Robles in Eat safely eating everything (Planet ). When we go to cook it, we can wet it with a little water and immediately apply an intense heat treatment: "don't even consider using it for raw preparation," warns the food safety expert.
Returning to the subject of freezing, if the eggs are going to expire and we want to increase their useful life, they can be stored in the freezer by beating them and keeping them in a hermetically sealed container, explains the FDA (United States Food and Drug Administration). We can freeze the white and the yolk together or separately, it will depend on the use we give them later in the kitchen.
It is not the first time that an ill-advised trick has gone viral. For a time it was very popular to freeze honey in a plastic bottle to eat it in bites. Then, some experts warned that it was a practice that could be harmful to our teeth. And, its high sugar and calorie content doesn't make it the healthiest snack either.
