Egg week at BigBarn!
It’s egg week! Did you know that we eat 1.2trillion eggs every year! This food needs to be celebrated, not only because they’re incredibly versatile, but also because they help keep you fuller for longer reducing that temptation to snack.
As with all our food however do be careful about the kind of eggs you buy, free range is not always an accurate description of how the chickens have been reared. With avian flu recently all chickens have been locked in to stop the spread of disease meaning all ‘free range eggs’ have been re-labeled.
Eggy facts:
– The Chinese consume forty per cent of the world’s eggs.
– An egg shell is made of calcium carbonate, making up 9-12 percent of an egg’s total weight, and contains pores that allow oxygen in and carbon dioxide and moisture out.
The colour of the egg depends on the chicken’s earlobes
– An egg white is mainly of protein and contains about 57 percent of an egg’s protein.
– The colour of an egg yolk is determined by hen’s diet. The more yellow and orange plant pigments there are in the grain fed to a hen, the more vibrant the colour of the yolk will be. (a happy chicken will also lay a brighter orange yolk)
– The other colours within an egg vary with its age and other factors. Egg whites that are cloudy indicate that the egg is very fresh, clear egg whites indicate an egg is ageing; pink or iridescent egg whites indicate spoilage, and these eggs should not be consumed.
– The average hen lays between 250 and 270 eggs a year but some lay more than 300.
– According to research published in 2008, male dinosaurs were sometimes responsible for sitting on eggs until they hatched.
– The world record for eating hard-boiled eggs is 65 in 6min 40sec.
– The colour of an eggshell is purely dependent on the breed of the hen.
– When an egg hatchets the chick assumes the first big animal it sees is its mother.
Office chucky
If you’ve been thinking about keeping chickens then they can be brilliant pets and we can highly recommend them
Not only are they an easy sell to your children when you say they’re the nearest living relative to T-Rex, but are very amusing to watch and can be great pets, even if they’re not that cuddly.
Our founder, Anthony, had a chicken that used to climb the stairs to his office every day and sit on the chair next to him watching BigBarn’s creation. Unfortunately, despite numerous warnings, she eventually got taken by a fox (the risk of complete free range), but she had a much better life than the average battery hen.
Friendly, busy, chucks
Chickens are also a fantastic way to help children understand where our food comes from, and we firmly believe every school should have some. Preferably in an allotment so you can all learn about fruit and veg.
For the freshest real free range eggs head to your local farm shop on the BigBarn local food map. You might even find someone to sell you some hens.
Or if you have a favourite egg recipe, or any other recipe, and would like the chance to win a prize, please video your recipe and add it to KIS (Keep it Simple) Cookery. Please have a look at existing videos here and try and keep your video less than 2 minutes long.