So look. Before you go about adorning your eggs with woolly bits, you need to get the eggy bits out of there.

The traditional way of doing this involves making a tiny hole on the top, a slightly larger hole on the bottom, sticking a toothpick or nail up in the egg to break apart the yolk, then using your mouth on the little hole to blow the raw egg out of the big hole.

And that’s totally what I did as a kid.  And I might still be able to bring myself to do that to a bright white chicken egg from the store. Maybe. Probably not really.

But these are duck eggs that I bought from that house up the street with the cooler by the driveway and the sign about eggs.  And, while they are large and sturdy and doubtless tasty, they also come dotted with reminders of just where it is that eggs come from.  I am not putting them anywhere near my mouth in that state.

So I pasteurized them.  We have a sous vide machine, and you can totally pasteurize eggs with it.  So I scrubbed the outsides clean and did that and then made holes in the shell and got rid of the goo.  And while that was certainly safer than doing it raw, it was still kinda gross.  If I find myself needing more in the future, I think I’ll order them on etsy. Or at the very least, I’ll order the egg blowing gizmo on amazon so I don’t have to get quite so up close and personal (amazon links are seriously always affiliate links, I’m such a meanie).

But, if you want to do your own you can.  And whether you pasteurize them or not us between you, your immune system, and your feelings about where eggs come from.  Or I mean you could always get plastic ones.  But that felt like cheating!