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Guess which is which?
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My hens eggs compared to store eggs
- Thread starter jill jackson
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Ameraucana, barred rock and buff orpington.
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No it's store bought.
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They have much better flavor, I scramble them in a pan I just fried country ham in and nothing better for breakfast.
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There's a somewhat similar difference in colour from factory vs free-range in store bought eggs. Here's to your home-grown hens, their nutritious eggs and the connection to your own home-grown food. Thumbs up - icons not working for me on dialup.
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Egg yolk color is based on diet.
We used to hatch and raise/sell chickens. One of the sales techniques for selling "Uncle Johnny Mills" feed was to have chickens being fed with different brands of feed (e.g., UJM, Purina, Wayne Feeds, Capitol Feeds, Wendland Feed, etc) and crack open their eggs each day to show the difference. Extra controls were to add red and blue food coloring to the feed. Yolks would have a light to dark green aspect (blue coloring) or a deep orange tinge (red coloring). Darker yolks were preferred.
Free range chickens have a darker yolk because they get a greater variety in diet, including bugs of all sorts.
Shell thickness is also due to diet. Ever notice how thin egg shells are from the store? They used to be very much thicker. We used to have pans of crushed oyster shells in the pens for the chickens to swallow into their craws. The calcium from the oyster shells is incorporated into the egg shells. This improved the shipability of the eggs. We didn't used to have fancy styrafoam trays for protecting the eggs during shipment.
Not providing additional calcium in diets means lower cost of production and thinner egg shells mean less weight shipping them. I haven't prepared a "egg shell average weight" study, but since the standard 55 ft 18 wheeler can carry about 8960 dozen eggs, a very small 3 gram per egg weight reduction would mean about 1 ounce per dozen weight reduction. This would reduce trailer weight by 560 pounds. Some level of fuel savings there.
We used to hatch and raise/sell chickens. One of the sales techniques for selling "Uncle Johnny Mills" feed was to have chickens being fed with different brands of feed (e.g., UJM, Purina, Wayne Feeds, Capitol Feeds, Wendland Feed, etc) and crack open their eggs each day to show the difference. Extra controls were to add red and blue food coloring to the feed. Yolks would have a light to dark green aspect (blue coloring) or a deep orange tinge (red coloring). Darker yolks were preferred.
Free range chickens have a darker yolk because they get a greater variety in diet, including bugs of all sorts.
Shell thickness is also due to diet. Ever notice how thin egg shells are from the store? They used to be very much thicker. We used to have pans of crushed oyster shells in the pens for the chickens to swallow into their craws. The calcium from the oyster shells is incorporated into the egg shells. This improved the shipability of the eggs. We didn't used to have fancy styrafoam trays for protecting the eggs during shipment.
Not providing additional calcium in diets means lower cost of production and thinner egg shells mean less weight shipping them. I haven't prepared a "egg shell average weight" study, but since the standard 55 ft 18 wheeler can carry about 8960 dozen eggs, a very small 3 gram per egg weight reduction would mean about 1 ounce per dozen weight reduction. This would reduce trailer weight by 560 pounds. Some level of fuel savings there.
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Yep, diet. Have you ever really smelled an egg (yoke and so forth)? I don't mean the ham, bacon, sausage or whatever you're cooking them with? It is not a really pleasant smell. But I don't notice it all the time....
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To me, the only time an egg smells "bad" if it is just on the verge of going bad (or has gone bad).
Egg use trivia - Does anyone know why, when cracking multiple eggs for a recipe, that one should crack each egg separately into a bowl before adding the egg to the mixing bowl?
There are 3 reasons - 2 are still valid reasons and the 3rd is due to problems from "the old days", which COULD be valid if you are raising your own eggs.
1 is to make it easier to remove any broken egg shells bits in the event you loose a piece of shell. It is easier to remove the piece from a bowl with a single egg in it than from a bowl with all the other ingredients in it.
2 is to facilitate several methods of separating the yolks from the whites.
The 3rd is to catch any "bad eggs" before they contaminate your recipe. If you are old enough you can remember hearing the term "He's a bad egg." when referring to a dishonest, irresponsible or otherwise disreputable person. That comes from the phrase "a bad egg" which refers to the cracking of an egg for use, only to find that it has "gone bad". Most folks think that means that the egg has spoiled in some way. While that is certainly true, the primary form of "bad eggs" back in the day was partially developed chicken embryos found when an egg is cracked.
This sort of "bad egg" is seldom seen with today's modern egg production methods because the mammoth egg producers never allow roosters on the facility. A hen can produce an egg without ever mating with a rooster. The egg will just never develop into a chicken, no matter how long it is incubated. So, no mating, no developing embryos.
If someone (such as our Jill) is raising chickens and are producing their own eggs, if they have a rooster running around, well, sometimes an egg gets overlooked for a day or 3 rather than being "picked fresh" from a nest and the fertilized egg could start to develop before being used, especially back before at-home refrigeration became common. So one prevention is to refrigerate any collected eggs asap.
You can sometimes determine if an egg is by candling it. The term comes from back when egg buyer would hold each egg up to a candle to see if an egg already had an embryo developing in it before paying the farmer for them. Later, with the advent of electricity and light bulbs, devices with light bulbs as the light source were developed. I remember having to candle hundreds of eggs a day back when my father bought eggs from farmers. Candling is also done when incubating eggs for hatching. It is used to determine if any of the incubating eggs have ceased developing and need to be discarded.
Egg use trivia - Does anyone know why, when cracking multiple eggs for a recipe, that one should crack each egg separately into a bowl before adding the egg to the mixing bowl?
There are 3 reasons - 2 are still valid reasons and the 3rd is due to problems from "the old days", which COULD be valid if you are raising your own eggs.
1 is to make it easier to remove any broken egg shells bits in the event you loose a piece of shell. It is easier to remove the piece from a bowl with a single egg in it than from a bowl with all the other ingredients in it.
2 is to facilitate several methods of separating the yolks from the whites.
The 3rd is to catch any "bad eggs" before they contaminate your recipe. If you are old enough you can remember hearing the term "He's a bad egg." when referring to a dishonest, irresponsible or otherwise disreputable person. That comes from the phrase "a bad egg" which refers to the cracking of an egg for use, only to find that it has "gone bad". Most folks think that means that the egg has spoiled in some way. While that is certainly true, the primary form of "bad eggs" back in the day was partially developed chicken embryos found when an egg is cracked.
This sort of "bad egg" is seldom seen with today's modern egg production methods because the mammoth egg producers never allow roosters on the facility. A hen can produce an egg without ever mating with a rooster. The egg will just never develop into a chicken, no matter how long it is incubated. So, no mating, no developing embryos.
If someone (such as our Jill) is raising chickens and are producing their own eggs, if they have a rooster running around, well, sometimes an egg gets overlooked for a day or 3 rather than being "picked fresh" from a nest and the fertilized egg could start to develop before being used, especially back before at-home refrigeration became common. So one prevention is to refrigerate any collected eggs asap.
You can sometimes determine if an egg is by candling it. The term comes from back when egg buyer would hold each egg up to a candle to see if an egg already had an embryo developing in it before paying the farmer for them. Later, with the advent of electricity and light bulbs, devices with light bulbs as the light source were developed. I remember having to candle hundreds of eggs a day back when my father bought eggs from farmers. Candling is also done when incubating eggs for hatching. It is used to determine if any of the incubating eggs have ceased developing and need to be discarded.
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The hen would have to set on the egg to get it to start developing and that trait has been largely bred out of modern chickens. In fact I've never seen any of mine, even act like they want to set. It's not hard to gather the eggs all up everyday anyway, so an egg would never have a chance to start developing in the first place. Yes, I do have a rooster though, because a good one looks after the hens and will attack any smaller hawks, such as cooper's hawks that are bold enough to go after hens.
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Game roosters like this are extremely protective of their hens.
