For starters, let's just get this out on the table: I have spent a somewhat significant amount of time and money on the emergency preparedness/food storage resources available at Macey's. The main reasons for this are that 1) they are the easiest to obtain where I live, 2) they seem to be the most reasonably priced, especially compared to internet vendors, and 3) they carry a pretty decent variety. I also buy a lot of food storage from the LDS cannery, but they carry a pretty limited number of products. Anyway, a while ago I bought a #10 can of powdered eggs from Macey's to see if they could be useful in my food storage. Here is the verdict:
First I used them in one of these Betty Crocker cookies-in-a-pouch things:
I didn't take a picture of the cookies, but I couldn't tell any difference in the appearance or the taste from when I had made the exact same cookies before. Score! That means that you don't have to axe any favorite baking recipes from your year's supply because they call for fresh eggs. All you have to do is add one tablespoon of egg powder to your dry ingredients and two tablespoons of water to the wet for each egg and voila! In fact, if you wanted to create your own cookies-in-a-pouch mixes, you could put all of your dry ingredients in a ziploc bag with some egg powder for the eggs and all you would have to do is add water and oil (or butter or shortening or whatever). Just like Betty!
(As a side note, I think those cookies mixes are pretty good. In the past I've been kind of a cookie snob and thought that all cookies must be made from scratch, but they tasted good and it made way more cookies than I would have thought a bag that size could.)
After I tried them in the cookies, I thought I'd put them to the ultimate test and make scrambled eggs out of them, as I had read in a couple of different places about other people doing it. Here is what they looked like reconstituted in the frying pan:
And here is what they looked like cooked:
And here is how they tasted in one word: blech.
I will definitely store these for baking. They are undetectable in baked goods, have a storage life of 5-10 years, and are relatively cheap (if you buy them on sale this week at Macey's, a can costs $14.99, which is about 80 cents for a dozen). But if I ever have to feed my family exclusively from our food storage, we're going without scrambled eggs. I could definitely gag them down with enough hot sauce or ketchup, but they're definitely the "if it was scrambled powdered eggs or starvation" kind of option.
Also, when I went to take a picture of the can, I noticed that I had two different products:
At first I wasn't sure if there was any difference between whole eggs and egg mix, so I checked the ingredients, which are as follows:
whole eggs: 100% pasteurized whole egg solids
egg mix: pasteurized whole eggs, non-fat dry milk, vegetable oil (may contain soybean oil or corn oil), salt.
I had done my previous testing with the whole eggs, so to be thorough I tried scrambling the egg mix. The end product from the egg mix was a tiny bit better; it looked and tasted a little more like fresh scrambled eggs. But given the choice between eggs made from egg mix and no eggs, I would probably still choose no eggs.
Another key difference between the whole eggs and the egg mix is that it takes only 1 tablespoon of whole eggs to make an egg and 2 tablespoons of egg mix for the same. And according to the can info, a can of whole eggs will reconstitute into 226 eggs, while a can of egg mix makes only 96 for the same amount of money.
Conclusion: Powdered "whole eggs" are great for adding baked goods that call for eggs into your year's supply. But reconstituted and scrambled, they taste... pretty bad. Powdered "egg mix" is a lot more expensive than powdered "whole eggs" and doesn't taste much better.
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