What is Egg Dipping you ask?

Well, just come along on our egg dipping tour and you shall find out!

Now, the first question to ask yourself is this:
"Where does an egg come from?"
 

WRONG!

     Here at the South Pole eggs come in these brown boxes.  Fifteen dozen eggs come in each brown box in fact.  Granted, you don't see any eggs here, but just wait ...  We got 30 such brown boxes for the winter, as we are hoping to have eggs until August.  AUGUST you say!  That's right folks, and to make sure we do have them until August we have to dip them in oil.

 
     See, I told you, you would see eggs - lot's of them!  And some scary people too apparently, but please don't let Daren frighten you away from this exciting Egg Dipping tale!
 

     Now the reason we dip eggs is not found in these pictures, so I will just have to go ahead and tell you.  It is when oxygen permeates the shell that the egg goes bad, so we oil the shell so no air can get in.  I don't have any information on how long the air-getting-in-and-spoiling takes, but I just know that we are supposed to oil the eggs at the start of the season, and then in about three months re-oil the eggs that are left.  Assuming the guess for the number of eggs was correct, three months after the second oiling will be August, and we probably won't have any more eggs after that.

 
Here we have two examples of the spoon dipping technique.

 
Now onto the
hand dippers!

Try to ignore Bill (we all do), because everyone else at the table was willing to get their hands dirty, and I just couldn't edit his spoon dipping out of the picture!

 
Wait, LOOK!  Are those converts we see?

     Yes it's true, nine out of ten previous spoon dippers now believe that hand dipping is better for your health.
 

     And isn't this convenient that if you look past the eggs in this photo, you see the second part, and in my opinion the more important part of the evening; OK, the part I was in charge of - you got it - Lemon Zesting!

 
     Ladies and Gentlemen, if you look to your right, you will see the lovely Sonja showing not only HOW to zest a lemon, but also her enthusiasm for the sport as well.  She has been trying for years to get Lemon Zesting into the Olympics, but thus far has failed. Although it looks like a one-woman event, we actually had a team working on that case of lemons, many of which were sporting shiny new blisters by the end of the evening.

A job well done!

Here is one last look at an overview of the evening.  Let me also take this moment to thank all the people (over half the station) who participated in the evening of Egg Dipping and Lemon Zesting.
You made our winter more bearable!

For those of you who sometimes miss the subtlties...

The color of this page is in honor of all those lemons who gave up their lives so we could have
lemon zest to bake with, and frozen bald lemons to accent our gin and tonics for the whole winter.
 
Please everyone, a moment of silence...

Back to Antarctica Page