A rainbow of eggs

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Natural Meadows Farm isn’t a new vendor in the Philadelphia area - they are a regular fixture at the Haddonfield Farmers Market and the market at Headhouse Square.  I’m excited to say that the Fair Food Farmstand is now carrying eggs from Natural Meadows: I was there when the first delivery came in yesterday.  And not just any eggs: gorgeous dozens of mixed heritage breed eggs!

Mark Skinner, the farmer from Natural Meadows, was kind enough to answer my stupid questions about his beautiful eggs.  I noticed that the label says that the eggs are “uncandled” and I had no idea what that meant.  Apparently, candling is a necessity if you’re planning on hatching chickens from eggs - eggs that are unfertilized should not be left in an incubator (candling allows you to sort of see inside the egg shell to figure out if there is a chick growing).  In terms of selling eggs for consumption, eggs are sometimes candled to remove eggs that have a blood spot in them.  Consumers are so far removed from farm life and normal chicken stuff that seeing a blood spot would likely freak them out.  However, eggs with a blood spots can be eaten without risk of something bad happening: they’re perfectly good eggs. The presence of a blood spot does not indicate contamination.  Rather, blood spots are usually caused by the rupture of a blood vessel on the yolk surface when it’s being formed or something like that.  In commercial mass egg production, candled eggs that have small blood spots are sold as “B grade”, although I have never seen anything other than grade A eggs for sale in the grocery store.  Good to know!

Skinner was kind enough to provide a diagram for which eggs came from what kind of chicken, which I find endlessly fascinating and feeds my compulsion to keep chickens of my own.  Here is the list:

Blue or Green eggs - Ameraucana
Dark brown eggs - Welsummer and Maran
Brown eggs - Speckled Sussex, Wyandotte, Turken
White eggs - Silver Spangled Hamburg, Blue Andalusian, Ancona

Coincidentally, the Turken chicken might be the ugliest chicken I’ve ever seen.  They are sort of the equivalent of the hairless cat. Yikes!

Natural Meadows produces eggs from heritage breed chickens, Tamworth heritage pork, grassfed beef, and specialty cheese.  You can also find their eggs at Bella Vista Natural Foods on the Italian Market.