I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that there is so much behind the color differences between cow’s milk and goat’s milk (see the comments following yesterday’s post), One other item that stands out in reviewing the nutrient comparison Jean linked to: could the whiteness of goat’s milk have something to do with its high calcium content?
The discussion got me thinking about the fine points of eggs. I’ve become something of an egg aficionado over the last few years, since I’ve come to realize that there is a huge difference in egg quality, depending on where you obtain them (and as I’ve overcome my fear of eggs as dangerous because of their cholesterol). One of the first stops I make when traveling to our condo in New Hampshire is to stop at a nearby ranch-style house with a small sign outside, “Eggs, $2.00”. I’ve only met the owner, Clair, briefly a couple times, because she sells her eggs via the honor system—you take a package of a dozen from a cooler outside her front door and leave your money in the cooler.
The first time I met her, a year ago, she was apologizing because she frequently ran short of eggs; seems her chickens were getting old and their production had declined. She’s since rectified that problem, presumably with some spring chickens.
She has a small hen house out back where the chickens do their thing. I’d love to get a tour of the hen house and engage Clair in the fine points of her chickens’ egg production, since her eggs are the best I’ve ever had. The yolks are a deep orange, and stand up high when you fry them.
Actually, my preferred way of eating eggs, and assessing their flavor and freshness, is to soft-boil them (remove them two minutes, 15 seconds after the water boils), slice off a small piece of the top, and eat them right out of the shell, sitting in an egg cup. (If you boil them too long, usually over two-and-a-half minutes, the yolks become too hard.) This is more European style, stemming from my parents’ German roots. (One thing I haven’t gotten myself to do is eat eggs raw, even mixed with milk in a smoothie; when I researched the story of my aunt’s experiences living with a group of children in southern France during the Holocaust, I learned that the adults in charge insisted that on the rare occasions when they obtained eggs, that the children eat them raw, supposedly to capture all the nutrients.)
A close runner up to Clair’s eggs are some I bought last week from Beth, the farmer I purchased my goat’s milk from. She has a neighbor with chickens, and those eggs were excellent—very delicate and tasty whites. They were also a combination of brown and white eggs, and widely varying sizes, and even some poop on a few of the eggs—which you never see at the supermarket.
Sometimes when I buy eggs at farmer’s markets, I’m disappointed. They don’t seem quite as fresh or the yolks as rich as they should be. Maybe they’re left sitting around too long.
I suspect that’s the big problem with eggs we buy at the grocery store. I once read where these eggs go through so many channels before getting to the store that they’re often weeks from having been laid. And, of course, if the chickens have been fed antibiotics and crammed together for months and months, the egg quality has to suffer–those pale yellow yolks are the result. And maybe that’s also behind the occasional reports of salmonella in eggs that we see from time to time.
When I was visiting in Florida last month, I bought some of the organic eggs with the high omega 3 content at Whole Foods. They were okay…but just not the same as Clair’s eggs. Nothing new there, I suppose—being spoiled by the real thing.
I’ve become quite fussy about eggs in the past couple of years. Our family of three goes through 3-4 dz eggs/week on average. My husband and I usually have two-three each most mornings, cooked slowly in lots of butter, Over-Easy. Yum! My son isn’t so interested in breakfast eggs more than once or twice a week, but he eats baked egg custard frequently (made with any raw milk/cream that has started to sour). Plus I often cook frittatas for lunch or evening meals. Eggs are a wonder food to me. They are delicious at any meal, in savory and sweet dishes or just on their own. Tehy show up in so many cuisines, too. Hard boiled eggs are a great quick snack or nutritious salad/sandwich garnish. And what a bargain, even the most premium ones. Chock full of protein and essential nutrients (micro and macro) at a pittance per serving. Yes, I could be an egg cheerleader.
My first source of wonderful eggs stopped selling at the local farmer’s market;I never found out why but I still miss the beautiful South American breed green shells (my kitchen paint was matched to a soft green egg shell). My next source was also at a farmer’s market, but her eggs were so boring despite their $3/50/doz price, like any supermarket eggs, so after a while I asked some more questions. Even though I always chose her "free range" eggs, her egg ranch had a 50,000 chicken flock, so that eggs-plained it! The 300 hen "free range" flock clearly wasn’t free range enough. Not worth the special trip at all!
Now I’m back to delicious eggs again. I get eggs from a small "hobby farm" in my county for $2/doz and they deliver weekly to a cooler on my porch (with my goat milk and meats). Much richer tasting. All shapes, sizes, yolks of different colors indicating that the chickens find their favorite things (bugs, greens, grain, or seeds). I gave a carton to a friend and her husband asked for more eggs like that (without knowing they were special). That was a blind taste test.
My source doesn’t have an egg washer machine, so the shells aren’t as pristine as commercial eggs, but no matter. I’m thinking about getting some layers for our garden (not enough to feed our enourmous egg habit, though) so I’ve been reading up on the subject. The eggs are coated with a oviduct liquid substance that dries right after laying ; the coating protects the interior (the shell is porous). The egg keeps longer with this dried coating intact. So my source just wipes off the eggs with a cloth if needed. I wash the eggshell if using it raw or barely cooked, otherwise I don’t bother for cooked eggs (even over easy runny yolk eggs). I like the natural look, anyway. Commercial eggs are washed, so then they are sprayed with an artificial coating to replace the natural coating.
It’s hard to go back to supermarket eggs if I run out in between deliveries, even the premium ones. Hens aren’t vegetarian at all and free range isn’t a legal term so I don’t think any can hold a candle to "real" eggs. I can’t wait to get my new "girls". One fence replace, one more to go. Still deciding on a coop style, though.
Ours are Dominiques, a heritage breed, which seems to mean nothing at all, except that they forage well and are fair producers of both meat and eggs. We also keep a couple of banty silkies to sit on the nest for replacement birds. (The banties get reliably broody, and will stay on the nest job to the end.)
If the chickens weren’t here I would miss those eggs, and really would miss watching the birds, which entertain child and adult alike. (For fun, watch a rooster herd, protect, and forage for his hens.) But truthfully, chickens are somewhat of a pain as well. Around here $1.50 a dozen is a high price–most are a dollar–so there’s no financial benefit (I added up the cost of henhouse, winter feed, equipment, and birds, and discovered that at $2.00/dozen in our very non-production-oriented operation, I’ll be at break even approximately 40 years after I’m dead.) But the real problem is poop. Unless you invest exhorbitant labor into henhouse cleaning, you’re faced with one of those periodic very-messy jobs. When your chickens free-range, as ours do around the house and other places, poop is a different sort of problem. Last year after a bobcat wiped out our flock, for a few days all I was thinking was, "Wow, I can lie down anywhere now!" (David, you may want to rethink that chicken coop tour.)
Still, all negatives pale against the beauty of the environment, health, and aesthetic of chickens and other domestic animals. They bring a very high quality of life, including the teaching of responsibilty (again, for child and adult alike). Besides a return to Eden where a Linda Diane Feldt-style wild-food collection could be completely sustaining, I’ll stick with the farm.
And, by the way, a friend raises ducks for eggs, which seem to be more prolific layers, and produce a very rich egg. His Khaki Campbells lay green eggs with a very hard shell. I grab them whenever I can. Unfortunately, because they don’t coop up at night, his loss to predators is great.
An attempt to legally have backyard chickens in nearby Ypsilanti was voted down.
I’m happy that one of the people in our herd share has eggs, and I get about a dozen a week. These are happy chickens, living ust outside of Ann Arbor, free range with organic feed supplementation if needed. Amazing taste. Our herd share group would love to have more from her, but she runs out. I insisted that we pay $3.50 a dozen (delivered) and so she has some incentive to supply us.
I think the whole eat local food movement is creating more interest in the very local concept of how about in your backyard, even in the city.It was only 50-60 years ago that my neighborhood (about a mile from downtown Ann Arbor) still had barns that housed horses and chickens and a few goats and cows. So it isn’t really that crazy of an idea – I’ve talked to people in their 80s and older who kept farm animals nearby when they were younger. Dozens of these small barns are still standing, used as garages.
In a throwback to that time, Ann Arbor allows people to keep 2 bee hives on their city lots. In the 80s I had two hives on my garage roof, now I have a hive on the North side of town and next year would like to put a few more in place.
I think the idea of small vegetable gardens (in place of lawns) and small numbers of domestic farm animals in people’s backyards is a movement whose time has come. In 5-10 years it may be a solution that everyone is embracing.
That’s great to know a time frame for unrefrigerated eggs. I wasn’t sure how much shorter the room temp time freshness span was compared to chilled (for unfertile eggs). 3 Doz takes up a lot of space in the fridge and I use them fast enough that sitting out is probably a good space saving option.
Now that I think about it, when I visited my MIL in England last summer it took me ages to find the eggs in the grocery store. I finally found them on a shelf in the center of the store, not in a chilled case. So much to learn. A root cellar would be a great thing, but in So. Cal, it is more of a pipe dream.
Feeding kelp really improves egg quality…lots of natural bio-available minerals and omega 3s.
Jenny
I see that some of you are paying, by my region’s standards anyway, handsomely for eggs, and I’ve noted before in this blog and elsewhere, wildly high prices (again, by our standard) described as "common" for high-quality milk and other farm products. Sometimes that talk is peppered with hope about reviving local farms by injecting real financial incentives for quality products. While that particular economic equation is sensible from the farmer’s perpective, my admittedly poor rural area (once rich with productive farms!) could be devastated by significantly higher food costs.
I suppose that, as a (very small) producer myself, I could cater to the moneyed, but that wouldn’t feel right while so many of my neighbors and friends are poor. Besides that, food prices in this particular food-producing region have a lot of inertia. History, the industrial cheap-food movement, plus I’m sure a lot of other factors I haven’t thought of, are at work keeping prices down.
Thus I worry about higher food prices as a solution for resurrecting farms, without a general economic transformation. I do support direct-to-consumer sales, but that alone would not put a dent in the problem here, where population density is low (37 people per square mile) and many must drive an hour or more to reach an urban center (where the successful farmers’ markets are, and there are very few of those). Understandably, there are relatively few David Gumperts out there willing to make long trips to connect with farmers.
One friend touted the internet as savior, to help farmers reach distant markets. That idea, I’m afraid, has a low ceiling–$20.00/pound cheeses don’t get to the overall food solution, which would be a properly prioritized economy. In our Walmartized, global-economy era, that looks very, very distant.
Like Linda Diane, I encourage anyone who can to raise 2 or 3 hens of their own. Many towns and cities will allow up to 6 hens (no roosters) in your back yard. It’s well worth it, for the eggs and for the entertainment.
Re: keeping eggs–I remember many years ago when my brother drove from California to Michigan in an un- airconditioned car in the heat of summer, taking his time, stopping and visiting friends and relatives, with a dozen eggs from Grandma’s chickens sitting on the floor of the back seat. He then drove back to CA, again in no hurry, and found the eggs when unpacking the car. They had probably been there a month or more at that point. He cooked them and ate them happily with no ill effects.