SubscribeBoiling Eggshells in Soup
I received a question last week regarding boiling egg shells with soup bones. My assumption was that it would be a good way to add some calcium to the soup, but I can’t find anything by Googling it. Has anyone had any experience with adding eggshells to soup, crushed or otherwise? I did find that simmering eggshells in chicken broth for 10 minutes will clarify the broth though. That’s interesting.
So I thought I’d turn it over to you all to see if anyone could help.
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Filed in Recipes and Cooking 4 Comments so far
Migraineur on 03 Mar 2008 at 4:59 pm #
My half-baked guess is that you could probably extract the calcium from the eggshells that way, but I’m not sure you’d want to. The neat thing about simmering bones in slightly acidic liquid is that you get *all* of the minerals that make up bone, and you get them in just about the right proportions. Adding the eggshell could unbalance that balance.
Nutrition journalists focus on calcium to the detriment of the other minerals we need to be healthy. We’re now starting to learn that it’s not just the total amount of calcium, but the ratio of calcium to other nutrients, that makes for healthy bones. Too much calcium, and not enough magnesium, is bad.
Now here’s what you *should* do with eggshells - rinse them slightly, crush them up, and put them in your compost heap. Tomatoes, in particularly, love and need calcium; tomatoes grown in calcium-deficient soil get a condition called “cat face,” which sounds cute but makes your tomatoes ugly and less nutritious.
Rebecca on 22 Jul 2008 at 3:36 pm #
What if I didn’t compost the eggshells but just crushed them and put them around my tomato plants?
Scott Kustes on 23 Jul 2008 at 7:48 am #
No clue Rebecca. Here’s an article that I found on adding eggshells to the holes you plant your tomatoes in. Hopefully Migraineur will chime in.
Cheers
Scott
Migraineur on 23 Jul 2008 at 9:39 am #
I have never tried it that way, but it would probably work. Maybe you could try digging them into the soil a little bit so no critters come by and carry them away!