Weird eggs: can you eat them?
Sometimes you have an egg that makes you think: this is really weird! An egg with a strange shell, a red blob inside or a double yolk: what is it, and can you just eat it?
Red spot in the egg
Does that mean the egg is fertilized? Definitely not. On a chicken farm, there are only hens, no roosters to fertilize them. A red blob like that is a drop of blood, released when the egg separates from the hen’s oviduct. Before eggs are packaged for the supermarket, they are all checked by a machine with a bright lamp that shines through the egg. As a result, most eggs with a red spot like that are sent to the breaker plant, as a raw material for cookie factories and rusks, but every now and then one slips through the checks.
Even if you get eggs from a farm or keep chickens yourself, you may occasionally find one like that among them. Nothing to worry about, it is perfectly edible – but if you find it off-putting, remove the spot from your egg with a knife.
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Ribbed eggshell
Some eggs are considerably larger than normal, or they have a ribbed shell. Poor hen, I always think when I find an egg like that in the carton; laying that must have been painful. If an egg’s exterior has a texture like sandpaper, those are calcium deposits that remained during laying. A ribbed egg is caused by little scars in the hen’s oviduct. Those eggs usually also go to the breaker plant, to end up in rusks.
The yolk is dark yellow or orange
If a hen has more carotene in her diet, the yolk automatically becomes more yellow. Hens that happily forage outdoors and peck at insects and plants also have darker yolks. The darker the yolk, the more omega-3s and beta-carotene it contains, so an egg is actually healthier for you.
Double yolk
Two yolks, one egg, what’s going on? That’s lucky; it sometimes happens when an egg is laid by a younger hen, or by a somewhat older laying hen that no longer lays an egg every day. The eggs are, of course, perfectly edible. Larger eggs in particular sometimes have a double yolk, so if you want to increase your chances of finding one, you can buy jumbo eggs.
Also read:
- Do you do this with empty eggshells too? Shame on you!
- Stop doing this: these five things often go wrong with deviled eggs
- So brown and white eggs are not the same
