I have a Sous Vide Supreme machine and I like raw eggs (in the shell). I've made a few batches by simply boiling them at 134 oF for 2-4 hours, but I have 2 problems: Some of the eggs crack and most of the eggs begin to coagulate. Are there better ways to do it?
There are commercially available Davidson's brand pasteurized eggs, but after checking 5 stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn where they were supposed to be stocked and weren't I've given up.
The definitive source for Sous Vide information on the web at the moment is Douglas Baldwin's wonderful A Practical Guide to Sous Vide. It has wonderful safety information and goes well beyond the 'recipe' side of Sous Vide. It's pretty much the bible (since Modernist Cuisine is too expensive).
Based on the information he has on pasteurizing eggs, I would suggest trying a shorter period of time. He says that 75 minutes at 135F will be sufficient. If you read through his stuff, you'll see that he doesn't play fast and loose with safety / times, so I would trust that time / temp. That's significantly shorter period than you are doing them. Hopefully that's your issue.
I'm not sure how much your white is coagulating, but this is what he has to say about it:
While the properties of the egg yolk are unaffected, the egg white is milky compared to a raw egg. Whipping time is significantly longer for pasteurized eggs, but the final whip volume is nearly the same
Update: There was a culinary research paper released in January that I think resolves this issue (or see this blog post for a more accessible overview). It turns out that the protein coagulation in eggs is a function of temperature and time, rather than just temperature as was commonly assumed. So leaving your egg in to pasteurize for longer than the minimum required time will affect the texture. So use the minimum time of 75 minutes and you should see a significant difference.
