Would you eat eggs past their best before date?

[SPARKLER1]

Title says it all. TIA

Yes definately use them. If more than a week over, do the float test.

Eat most things even if after Best Before date, just sniff or tiny taste if in doubt, but I firmly believed that Best Before dates were invented by a marketing expert to make us thow away good food and buy more.

oh and I don't keep eggs in the fridge.

Delia always says eggs should be cooked from room temp, but I can never remember to take them out of the fridge in advance.

only by a week max - and then only in cakes. normally chuck em thou esp after 3/4 days

My Great Autie Batty was famous for keeping food in the fridge or pantry for far too long.
She normally wouldn't allow anyone in the kitchen when she was cooking but once my mum saw her take a jug of gravy out of the fridge, scrape off a thick, furry, green layer, then heat it up and serve.

She used to serve up things like aspic chicken (Yuk).

I have to say Auntie Batty died recently in her late 90s and she and her husband barely had a day's illness. They were extremely robust people in every way. (Sniff)

Spidermama

My guess is that your Auntie Batty (wonderful name) had bvuilt herself a fantastic immune system, that could cope with anything she chucked at it. I think many kids today are being made 'delicate', because their systems don't experience enough bacteria to learn to fight it.

Apparently it is becoming a big prob in the U.S.
It's why I don't use anti-bacterial cleaning fluids etc in my house.

Yes. Eggs only have a best before date, not a use by (and I remember when they didn't even have that!) I wouldn't use them if they were months out of date - but a week or so, yeah no problem.

Definitely!

Eggs don't actually go off for a good fortnight after their date. The UK are so hysterical about best before dates.

If you crack and egg onto a saucer and the yolk is lovely and yellow and rounded.... then the egg is fine, despite what the date says!

I eat beef too if its only a day or 2 passed it's date.... it tastes nicer when its browned anyway!

really? I can eat beef when it is browned?

Yes Barbara, good quality beef is hung for 3 weeks before being cooked, and shouldn't be that horrid bright red colour that it is in the supermarket plastic packs.

The trick is smell it. If it smells of meat it's fine, if the smell is unpleasant (rank is the word) then don't eat it.

Haven't read the whole thread. I would eat eggs up to 10 days over their date BUT only if they are thoroughly cooked through.

If you have loads of eggs that you don't think that you are going to use, you can crack them into a freezer dish, whip them up a bit and freeze. They are then fine for baking with, but no use for eating just as eggs - if you see what I mean.

I go with instinct. If it looks and smells ok, then I'll eat it, regardless of best before dates. Like SoupDragon, I've had chicken - kept in the fridge after a Tesco delivery - go off before its sell by date (and smell foul). It was a particularly hot summer - but my fridge was working fine. Fish also.

I've wondered whether the Super Smell Powers one develops in pregnancy are designed to help one detect rank food. I've had to be really disciplined whilst pregnant NOT to just cut the mould off things and use the rest.

Btw - when I saw the thread title on the home page, I wondered if it was going to be a discussion about ovaries and the clock...

RedZuleika

You are right, we do develop a better sense of smell to avoid eating anything that could compromise the pregnancy.

Doesn't explain why the smell of the blue variety of ajax floor and surface cleaner always made me thow-up while I was pg.

I buy my eggs direct from the farm & was told never to refrigerate them as they go off quicker.Once they've been in a fridge you have to keep them in one apparently.I've never kept them in the fridge & never had a bad or stale one yet.

I'm with the "if they smell OK, use them" camp - both for eggs and most other food. That's what our noses are designed to do - and why "bad" food smells off.

I'm sure that's why dh and I rarely have stomache upsets - and when we do, it's never been becasue of food we would have thought was suspect.

In 25 years, I have only ever had one bad egg - which ironically (given that when I lived on my own, I frequently had eggs that were months old in the fridge) was from a "fresh" batch - but it wasn't me, it was a friend who had the "pleasure" of cracking it open.

Yes not only the eggs but also cheese and bread after their past date.

yep.

Only thing with bread is it goes a bit dry, or modern loaves in plastic bags get green mould on the edges. I tear those bits off tho' and eat the rest.

well I make bread (in the breadmaker), cakes and flapjack - funnily enough they don't have Best Before Dates on but they don't make us ill.....

The Sell By date on bread is when it gets mould!

The sell by date on cheese (say Cheddar) is when there is too much mould to be able to slice off.

Easy - you're right, wee bits of mould like that can just be pulled off!

Stale bread makes the best toast or bread and butter pudding or Apple Charlotte

Waiting for someone to say that they've eaten eggs that are years past their sell by date....

Eggs keep ages - they never get to their best before date in our house! Am peculiar re milk though - and as for deliberately mouldy cheese - blee!

I have chocolatequeen..... just over a year past the sell by date to be truthful.

It was a cadburys creme egg though.....

Don't think that I can admit to years out of date - but can definitely put my hand up for months out of date.

Not any more though, as I do quite a lot of baking with ds - and he loves breaking the eggs when we're maming biscuits and cakes. At the weekend, I went through more than twelve eggs: it was ds' birthday though, so I was making birthday cake, fairy cakes, biscuits....!