What you see: The top of your egg is gray.
What it is: Moisture between the shell membrane and the base of the shell.
Eat or toss: The egg is fine to eat!
It’s OK to eat eggs that have a gray cast on the narrow end
We previously wrote about eggs with little gray dots on them–in that case some harmless moisture was trapped in the shell. But here we have an egg that’s nearly solidly gray at its narrow end. Is that also moisture?
Yes!
And, just as before, it’s harmless.
“That moisture is reflecting light differently, so that’s the reason why it looks gray,” said Deana R. Jones, director of the U.S. National Poultry Research Center. “You don’t have to worry about the quality or the safety of it or anything.”
Phew!
“If you put this in front of a candle, it would light up like a Christmas tree,” said Jones, whose center is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “It would be the brightest part of the egg, because of the way the moisture would be reflecting the light.”
The gray doesn’t indicate any microbial action. I asked Jones if it might facilitate mold growth (here’s what truly moldy eggs look like) and she said that while she wasn’t aware of research on that risk, the amount of water was truly very small. In terms of how the water gets in, she said it’s hard to say for sure, “but we do see them coming out of the barn looking like that.”
This type of shell discoloration, known as mottling, is easier to see in white eggs. Jones said that the pattern of gray is random–there’s no known reason to why some eggs develop little dots and others bear gray crowns on their narrow ends.
“It’s just the uniqueness of what happened with that egg,” she said.
