Lulu laid an egg!

This is a sure sign of spring.

Lulu is a 4-year old Speckled Sussex. She doesn’t lay during the winter, and she goes broody in the summer. In between, she lays lovely brown eggs, just not very many. This year I’m actually hoping that she’ll go broody, so I can put some of the chicks coming at the end of April under her. Being Lulu, though, she’ll undoubtably do something unexpected.

Chickens require dust baths for health and happiness. But, right now it’s 20º colder than usual for early March, there’s 18 inches of snow under the bushes where they usually take late winter dust baths, and there’s several feet of snow in their run. There’s no dirt, let alone loose, warm earth to get under their feathers and next to their skin to kill parasites.

So, I went to K-Mart and purchased two kitty litter pans, and filled them with sand, fireplace ashes (all hardwoods) and food-grade diatomaceous earth. There’s a spot of sun in the HenCam run, so I set one down there. You know who’s on the top of the pecking order by who gets the first bath.

Buffy settled right in.

Next it was Lulu’s turn. Notice the dirt that she’s kicked up onto her feathers. She’s about to fluff and ruffle and have it settle onto her skin. Chicken bliss.

The Big Barn has plenty of room inside for the dust bath, and there’s sun streaming in the window. Just the right place for their new spa. The girls are wary of the bin, but I’ve tossed in some corn. They’ll soon be sun-bathing, too.

I wish that spa treatments for myself were so inexpensive and easy!

The perfect hard-cooked egg is cooked by steam. Thank-you to Terry P’s comment yesterday, saying that steaming eggs for twenty minutes make eggs easy to peel, I decided to do some investigating on my own. I took freshly laid (that day!) eggs, put them in a steamer basket, and to my great surprise, the peels came off easily. What was going on?

You food science geeks out there might have a more detailed explanation, (and I’d be happy to hear it) but basically, steam is a gas and so is able to penetrate the egg shell’s pores. The steam toughens the membrane between the egg shell and the whites, allowing the egg to be peeled without any trouble at all. Water’s molecules are too big to enter the egg, so although the insides become set from the heat, the membrane isn’t affected.

Why didn’t I know this? It’s one of those hit yourself on the head and go “duh!” moments. I’ve seen these egg cookers at flea markets and have thought how neat looking they were, but never thought about how they worked.

They’re egg steamers! Obviously, a lot of people knew that you could take fresh eggs and hard cook them to perfection in steam. But, if you didn’t grow up with one of these appliances, that knowledge was lost.

I know what I’ll be looking for at a flea market this spring.

By the way, vinegar has a totally different effect on eggs. It reacts chemically with the shell to break it down into calcium carbonate and gas. If you leave an egg in a bowl of vinegar, the shell will dissolve. Leave it in long enough and the egg turns into a rubberized ball! (This was one of my son’s favorite science experiments.)

Cooking an egg in it’s shell is one of the simplest cooking tasks, and yet so many get it so wrong. First of all, you shouldn’t boil an egg. When cooked at a high temperature, components of the yolk interact and a green ring forms. It’s edible, but ugly. Eggs should be hard-cooked, not hard-boiled. To do this, put eggs into a pot of water, making sure that there’s a good inch of water covering them. Bring to a full simmer, but not a rolling boil. Turn off the heat, and cover. Let sit for 14 minutes for small eggs and 16 for large ones. Chill the eggs in ice water and then drain and peel. The eggs will be firm, but not rubbery, and will have a beautiful yolk.

What you do not have to do is prick the end of the egg before cooking! I’ve seen this advice time and again, with the caveat that your egg will crack if you don’t. This is one of those myths that comes from a germ of truth. Years ago, before factory farms and cold storage, eggs were seasonal. Come winter and eggs were dear. A farmer would store eggs and sell in them in February, when the price was high. They used something called water-glass to preserve the eggs. Water-glass is a chemical, sodium silicate. When mixed with water, it forms a protective gel, which sealed off the pores of the egg shell. So, if you boiled an egg that had been sealed in such a way, the air in the egg would explode the shell – unless you pricked the end with a needle.

If your eggs do crack when cooking, it is likely that the shells were thin. Older chickens lay thin-shelled eggs. Even fed oyster shell for calcium, eggs from older hens are fragile. That’s yet another reason why commercial farms don’t keep chickens past the second molt. Egg breakage is too costly. I’ve learned to put the thin-shelled eggs gently in the egg basket and to not hard-cook them.

There are also plenty of myths about how to cook eggs so that they peel easily. Egg peeling ease is almost 100% a product of how old the egg is. The older it is, the easier to peel. Eggs less than 10 days old are always a pain to peel – the white sticks to the shell. This is because the membrane between the shell and white isn’t firm. So, if you want to hard-cook your freshly laid eggs, put them in a carton, label it with the date and store in the fridge for a week.

I have a recipe to share with you that uses hard-cooked eggs, but the eggs in my fridge are too fresh. So, I’m going to buy eggs from a small local farm and will post the results later this week.