Guess Which Of These Eggs Is From A Healthy Chicken?
One of the more fascinating aspects of living in the twenty first century is the totally different approaches to food. We ar connected to community farms from friends and family, spoiling us with organic homegrown everything.
Regarding chicken eggs, the sizes vary, the colors of the shells vary however if the egg comes from the family farm, the yolks almost invariably a darker color. It is also thicker than the standard yellow yolk you discover at the shop.
Yolks from homegrown eggs ar not only darker orange, but conjointly fuller and thicker. Even the eggshells are denser and tougher to crack. But what’s the big deal regarding orange yolks? Besides being a in demand color, orange yolks are AN indication of a well balanced and extremely nutritive diet.
A few things factor into the creating of AN orange yolk: xanthophylls, omega-3 fatty acids, and meats. Xanthophylls are a category of carotenoids. Carotenoids are natural plant pigments found in several fruits and vegetables.
It’s often thought that beta-carotene, one of the more well-known carotenoids, is responsible for giving yolks the orange pigment that folks associate with carrots. But in existence, beta-carotene edges yolks nutritionally, rather than colorfully.
Did you know that chickens aren't meant to be vegetarian, no matter what your premium carton of organic/grain-fed/cage-free eggs tells you? Chickens are omnivores naturally and their healthiest diets embody meats, such as mealworms, beetles, grasshoppers, grubs, and whatever creepy-crawly they will pull out of the bottom. Chickens are better-known to attack tiny rodents and snakes!
So, how do we tend to get those pleasant dark orange yolks from our backyard chickens?
Let your ladies go on the garden particularly if you’re digging over new beds — or even simply a replacement patch of dirt in their chicken tractor) for AN orange-boosting bug buffet.
Give them lots of fresh greens to extend the lutein in their yolks. The darker the green the better, so I usually fix them a feast of edible amaranth kale, collards, broccoli leaves, or whatever I happen to have growing in my garden. If it’s the middle of winter and your garden greens are lacking, you can feed them alfalfa.
They’re very handy helpers at the end of the season after most of my greens have latched and become bug-ridden. Let the chickens clean up those plants before you pull them out for your heap. It’s a win for everybody! (Except the bugs, that is…)
After a few weeks, you’ll be so used to examineing orange yolks (the approach most folks are conditioned to see yellow yolks) that you simply may even assume they haven’t modified in color.
Buy some eggs from the store and crack them into a bowl along with your homegrown eggs — you’ll be surprised at the difference! When it comes to yolks, the color is decided by a hen’s diet, not its breed (artificial color additives are not permissible in eggs) or the freshness of the egg.
Hen diets heavy in green plants, yellow corn, alfalfa and other plant material with xanthophylls pigment (a yellow-orange hue) can produce a darker yellow-orange vitellus.
Diets of wheat or barley produce pale yellow yolks; hens fed white cornmeal produce virtually colorless yolks. Free-range hens could have access to additional heavily pigmented food thus they could turn out eggs with darker yolks.
According research consumer preference is typically for light-weight gold- or lemon-colored yolks. At the end of the day, know your farmer and the diet of the chickens manufacturing the eggs to be eaten.
