… not by volume. You’ve seen that before, it’s on all the potato snack bags and cracker boxes, things that you open and wonder, “why are they using such a large container for such a small amount of product?” Well, today I learned that our eggs are packed that way as well. By the chickens, though, not by us! What am I talking about???
Just stay with me now and let me explain. In general, we sell our eggs “nest run” style. That means, you get what you get – the run of the nest. We do not grade our eggs, we do not size our eggs, we had never weighed our eggs. You want a dozen eggs? Here ya go. I say “in general” because we do separate out the Banty eggs from the regular chicken eggs – they are so small that would just be ridiculous to try and mix them in. Of course, we don’t put duck or goose eggs in with chicken eggs because like must go with like, according to the rules. We also don’t sell the smaller eggs from the chickens just beginning to lay with the more established layers, again – they are quite a bit smaller, and we have some customers that just want those smaller eggs. We’ve just been doing that by sight and it’s worked fine.
Then, all of a sudden, BAM! we were given a scale. My boss, David, brought it in one morning and said, “Here! I know you need this.” He recently lost all if his chickens and sold his ranch, so now he’s been giving us things he finds that we might want to use, like the incubator – and the scale. This is an old scale, it is for medium eggs, I’m pretty sure. Well, what constitutes a medium egg… could have been a large egg when the scale was created. I find all types of listings for “modern egg weights” but I have not been able to find anything earlier than modern. What I have found is that most recipes are based on using 2 oz eggs, Large, by US standards. Our little scale will measure a 2 oz egg, just, anything over 2 oz bottoms out the scale. It also cannot weigh a Peewee egg at all – those are the banty eggs, doesn’t even move when I put those on there. It will do a small – we have some of those from the little Hamburg hens that we call The Three Sisters. HOWEVER, eggs that I thought were Small weighed in as Mediums and Mediums, based on their size, actually weighed in as Large. Those chickens can pack a lot of weight into a small volume.
This has always been the case with the duck eggs. A dozen duck eggs weigh considerable more than a dozen chicken eggs. The albumin in the duck eggs is quite a bit thicker than the chicken eggs. That’s why we like to use them in baking, things come out so much more moist with duck eggs. If you boil them, the duck egg whites are considerably more dense than chicken, they make GREAT deviled eggs to take to parties because they do not break easily – and no one ever knows the difference. In this bowl at left is a large chicken egg next to a regular duck egg. It is a bit difficult to see, but you can just make out the whites around the duck egg show as less translucent than the whites around the chicken yolk. It’s something that you’ll just need to experience for yourself. This went off on a tangent here. But still goes to prove the packed by weight premise. I guess the best thing to do would be to buy some of each and test them out for yourself! Always a good idea.
We continue to fluctuate on egg numbers. Today we got a whopping total of 17 chicken and four duck! Sue found where the ducks were burying their eggs under the straw. Silly little ducks. We also found where Roma, the goose, was laying her eggs outside. They keep trying to hide them from us. Will they never learn?
That’s our story for today. Thought it was going to be short, but then it just kept going and going. Thanks for sticking it out! We’ll try to have a goose egg incubation update on Tuesday. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading.
P.S. I’m not proofing this, so don’t judge.
Today’s Weather: Finally warmed up to 58° today. It’s been rather cold last couple of days. We had some really cold temperatures towards the end of the week. A dusting of snow on Friday, hard freeze this morning… it was 29° when Sue awoke at 4am.
Egg Report: Please see the penultimate paragraph prior to the Weather.
Wing and a Prayer 