Powdered eggs

History

Dehydrated eggs advertisements appeared in the late 1890s in the United States. Powdered eggs appear in literature as a staple of camp cooking at least as early as 1912.

Powdered eggs, known also as dried eggs, were widely used in the United Kingdom during World War II when food (including both fresh and dried eggs) was rationed. While nutritious, they were not a culinary treat; Esther Rantzen, reminiscing about the time, wrote that there were few real eggs, and "I can still remember the disgusting taste of powdered egg". It was also part of military rations. Bob Hope joked during a USO show, "Fellows, the folks at home are having a terrible time about eggs. They can't get any powdered eggs at all. They've got to use the old-fashioned kind you break open".

Quality

Powdered eggs have a storage life of 5 to 10 years when stored without oxygen in a cool storage environment.

The process of spray-drying eggs oxidizes some of the cholesterol content into oxysterol. It was found in a 1985 trial that feeding chickens with dried egg yolks or a cholesterol-free diet slightly reduced atherosclerosis of the aorta when compared with fresh egg yolks.

A 2022 study found that spray-drying mostly retained the high nutritional quality of pasteurized whole eggs without accumulating potentially harmful compounds.

Foaming power

Many types of cake requires trapping air in a matrix of beaten eggs (mainly the proteins in egg white) for its foamy texture. Drying eggs with heat reduces the ability of the reconstituted mixture to produce foam, but powdered eggs with reduced yolk content and a little sodium lauryl sulfate can produce foam as light as fresh whole eggs. (Yolk and other oils reduce the foaming ability of egg mixtures, whether fresh or reconstituted.)

With pure egg whites, freeze-drying retains much more foaming power than conventional spray-drying. A lower spray-drying temperature is associated with better preservation of foaming power.

Related products

Powdered egg whites

Egg white can be dried alone for better foaming. The result is egg white powder.

The ingredient called egg white protein is virtually identical to egg white powder, as no additional step is employed to separate the protein in egg white from other components before drying. Dried egg white products often have their foaming ability compromised by the inadvertent inclusion of egg yolk. Adding phospholipase A2 appears to break down the contaminant and restore the foaming power.

References

References

1. unidentified, English. (1898-03-05). "English: Based in St. Louis, Charles Fred LaMont's company produced egg substitutes and partly targeted miners of the Alaska Gold Rush. In 1898, the manufacturers shipped over 100,000 pounds of Crystallized Eggs to South African miners.".
2. [https://books.google.com/books?id=DvUWAAAAYAAJ ''Along the Mohawk trail; or, Boy scouts on Lake Champlain''], Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Grosset & Dunlap, 1912, p. 219.
3. Welsh, Susan. (8 January 2017). "Nostalgic letters written during the war years about rationing make for fascinating reading". Press and Journal.
4. (2002-05-30). "Bob Hope's USO Joke Bag". Los Angeles Times.
5. "Powdered Eggs". USA Emergency Supply.
6. (1986). "The effect of dried and fresh eggs on plasma cholesterol and atherosclerosis in chickens". Poultry Science.
7. (2 September 2022). "Evaluation of spray-dried eggs as a micronutrient-rich nutritional supplement". Frontiers in Nutrition.
8. (November 1982). "Foaming Properties of Fresh and of Commercially Dried Eggs in the Presence of Stabilizers and Surfactants". Poultry Science.
9. (April 2023). "Foaming properties of dried egg white at different outlet temperatures". Journal of Food Engineering.
10. (21 September 2021). "Comparative Study on Foaming Properties of Egg White with Yolk Fractions and Their Hydrolysates.". Foods.