Have you arrived home from a hard day at work, ravenous and ready to eat, only to find the chicken that you got from the grocery the day before smells like eggs?

If you’ve never had this happen before, it may baffle you why your chicken smells so weird.

In this article, we’ll discuss why chicken smells like eggs. Continue reading to learn more.

Why Raw Chicken Smells Like Eggs?

The meat may have an eggy fragrance when opened from fresh, frozen, or vacuum-packed sources.

To be clear, we’re referring to the fragrance of boiling eggs here, not rotting eggs.

Chicken that smells like boiling eggs will not throw you off your feet, but chicken that smells like rotting eggs is rancid and you should discard it immediately.

Salmonella Enterica

Salmonella Enterica is a possible source of raw chicken’s eggy odor.

E. coli and Salmonella are the two most common bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses.

Both chicken and egg products are susceptible to salmonella contamination, which can lead to an intestinal infection called bacterial enterocolitis.

Raw chicken may have a sulfur or egg odor because of the bacteria Salmonella.

However, if the meat is properly prepared, these bacteria may be avoided and eradicated. Cook the chicken to a temperature of 165°F to eliminate the risk of salmonella contamination.

Vacuum-Sealed Meat

When buying chicken, you may find it in vacuum-sealed containers. Fresh and frozen chicken both have this egg scent problem.

While many supermarkets will warn you about the packed chicken’s eggy scent, they don’t explain why it happens.

The gasses employed to package the meat give off an eggy scent, which is also known as a confinement smell.

When packing chicken, it’s necessary to remove the oxygen from the air and add a preservative gas like sulfur dioxide to keep the meat fresh.

To put it another way, the addition and extraction of these gases are to blame for vacuum-sealed chicken’s eggy fragrance. This, however, is not a reason for alarm.

Cooking the chicken to a temperature of 165°F removes the scent of boiled eggs, which can linger after it has been out on the counter for a while.

Spoiled Blood

Even if you’ve opened the chicken prior to the expiration date, it may still have a foul odor.

This might be because the chicken’s blood spoils more quickly than the flesh itself in the refrigerator.

In certain cases, the smell of boiling eggs might be coming from the blood that has spoiled before the meat.

As such, this doesn’t always imply that your bird is rotten. To get rid of the eggy flavor, rinse the chicken with water and let it sit for a few minutes.

You can cook and consume the chicken if the scent of eggs has gone away. Remember to cook your meat to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit.

What Should You Do if Your Chicken Smells Like Eggs?

Once you’ve determined that the chicken is still safe to cook and eat, there are a few things you can do to minimize the odor.

To begin, after taking the chicken from the freezer, run it under cold water to remove any remaining salt.

After that, drizzle a tiny bit of lemon juice or vinegar over the meat. If you don’t like acidic flavors in your chicken, you can rinse it off prior to cooking.

Leave the lemon juice or vinegar on for several minutes. This should help to mask the odor.

After that, give the chicken another wash and season it well with salt. You are free to boil or prepare it in whatever way you like.

Add some bay leaves to the dish once it’s finished cooking to help mask the scent even more.

Takeaway

A few causes exist for the strange scent of raw or refrigerated chicken that resembles rotten eggs. But how can you decide whether to cook or throw away chicken that doesn’t smell quite right?

There are a variety of methods to determine if the chicken has gone bad, but ultimately, it comes down to personal preference.

If you’re of the “better safe than sorry” ideology, there’s no reason not to err on the side of safety.