I coordinate a couple of local food clubs in my area of town, and we recently began purchasing eggs from a different farmer. These eggs are amazing and quite unlike anything you’ve ever purchased at the store I’m quite sure – organic or not!
Ever seen double yolk eggs before, not just one in a blue moon, but LOTS of them?
The egg delivery I received this week had eggs so large that some of them looked like duck eggs. In addition, half or maybe more were double yolk eggs! It is easy to see why eggs like this are never in stores. There is little chance they would even fit in a standard size carton!
In addition, eggs this size typically come from layers that are older. Since chickens that mass produce eggs don’t live very long due to unfavorable living conditions, this would also keep egg size in check.
If you’ve never seen eggs like this, why not? Are you still supporting the industrial food complex by buying your eggs at the store, which are, in many cases, months old?
Even organic eggs from the store are no comparison. Just get some farm fresh eggs and compare the difference. Deep golden to orange yolks, much bigger size, stronger shell, better taste, double yolks, cheaper price.
You don’t need any double blind studies to see and taste the difference. Your five senses will do you just fine, thank you!
By the way, if double yolk chicken eggs aren’t easily available to you, look for goose eggs instead. They are becoming more widely available and the larger yolk makes them comparably as rich as their double yolked cousins.
*Thank you to Paul Hardiman for emailing this mouth watering picture to me shortly after Tuesday’s pickup. What a fantastic brunch you enjoyed, Paul!
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Do you know of a farm that I can buy eggs in South Florida? Miami area?
Best!
LDA
I have no idea. Sorry. 🙁 Best to contact your local Weston A. Price Chapter Leader for your area to get a list (westonaprice.org)
Our family thrives on our little flock’s eggs. We keep about 12 layers at a time and could sell many more if we had them. People tell us they love the beautiful, healthy, hard-shelled eggs, and the rich, bursting with flavor, yolks. I personally feel that a farm fresh egg is healthier when it is a single (normal) egg, but that’s just me. I grew up on fresh farm eggs so “double yolkers” were seen quite often. At any rate, the real point is, there is nothing like fresh eggs straight from happy hens. And people tell us that ours are the best they’ve tasted from sellers around the area. I love our chickens! At $3 a dozen they are a bargain to those we share them with.
Fun post! 🙂 Thanks!
We get at least one double yolk egg a day from our flock of chickens. It’s always exciting every time we crack one open. However, we’ve found that there are two downfalls for us when it comes to the double yoke eggs.
Our “red star” hens (a crossbreed bred specifically for laying) lay most of our double yoke eggs. They are our youngest hens. A handful of those hens seem to lay double yokes a couple times every week. The downfall is that whenever they lay a double yoke, they skip laying an egg the next day…. The double yoke is like two eggs combined into one egg. The other downfall is that we can’t fit these huge eggs in cartons! lol! As someone mentioned before, double yokes can be a problem for breeding/hatching new chicks. This isn’t a problem for us though (at least not yet), because we don’t hatch our own chicks.
Anyway! Despite the double yoke downfalls, they are still super cool!! They are definitely an exciting perk to raising your own chickens.
Our city, Grand Rapids, MI has been fighting w/ the city to let us have city chickens in our backyards. So far, “no go.” So depressing.
We have been buying eggs from a local health food store from a local farmer who has good practices, but compared them to a friend’s eggs whose chickens are truly pastured. What a difference.
Sarah, I wonder where you got your information that double yolks come mostly from older chickens? I have chickens and have had the same experience as Ann – when they’re first starting to lay, they give a lot of double yolk-ers, (along with some other crazy stuff – tiny eggs, eggs without shells, even two shell-less eggs joined by a thin tube once) and after a few months their reproductive systems seem to settle into normal mode and the double yolks become more rare. When we have a group just starting to lay, it’s not uncommon for half or more to be doubles.
Hi Audry, was told this by a chicken farmer.
Yes – it is my understanding from several chicken farmers that double yolks occur when hens first start laying and are much more rare as the chicken ages.
Most large store eggs taste like soapy water to me now and make me want to retch. That is why we have our own chickens and duck for eggs. Oh my gosh, they are so good. In fact, my hubby is the chicken/duck man and he just bought 4 baby ducks 2 days ago. He loves duck eggs, too. Our daughter who is married will not eat any other eggs, so we always supply her family also. Can’t be beat.
Our experience has been that when the chicken first begins to lay again or starts to lay for the first time, we get the double yolks. They do eventually stop after a time and go into “normal” egg mode. We love the double yolks and our wonderful pastured eggs. The customers clambor when we start to sell them again after the girls have taken a winter break. I refuse to buy store-bought eggs.
On the down side, I’m aware of a producer locally here that raises his chickens “free-range”. The legal means of this is that each chicken has to have access to being outside, but doesn’t say for how long. These chickens are raised in hoop houses with screened sides with dirt bottoms and fed commercial feed. In this way, the producer can lable his eggs free range. So be duped into thinking your eggs are free range. Buy right from the producer himself so you can see for yourself how your chickens are being raised. If one doesn’t greet you when you pull up, run!
I have yet to find farm-fresh eggs around me that are less expensive than at the grocery store. 🙁 But, oh well.
I actually grew up on farm fresh eggs and often had double yolkers, but haven’t had them after moving out of my parents’ house until recently when we found out that a co-worker is also a farmer. I’m not too keen on his farming practices (mainly industrial), but the eggs he gives us are from his free range flock. I loved having double yolkers again! Temporarily, anyway. They’re too big for my egg carton, which made them a pain to store. 🙂
Ever seen triple yolkers? I’ve only seen them a few times in my life, but it was the coolest thing ever! I swear my dad got a quad once when I was a teenager, but neither of us is 100% sure that we’re remembering that right.
I go back and forth on whether or not I think double-yolks are a good thing when I see it in our duck flock (which used to happen a lot, especially when our current flock was under a year old–I find it interesting that you say it happens in older birds–my upcoming flock is not laying yet so I wonder if they will lay doubles when young also? I dont’ know…). I understand that, from a consumer’s point of view, the double yolk seems like more nutrition (though in my experience it isn’t really twice as much because the doubles tend to be smaller than one large yolk, at least in a duck egg–the total egg size is only slightly larger). My concern is twofold:
1. The larger the size of the egg, the bigger the threat to the health of the layer. Hens will die if they are egg-bound.
2. If double-yolk eggs are fertilized, they will never actually be fruitful. It is impossible for poultry to have “twins”–an egg can only support a single bird, at least as a general rule. Every once in a while, you hear a story of “twin” or “triplet” eggs, and for the most part the babies can develop fairly normally, but they will die upon hatching. Usually, if you hear of survival upon hatching, these were human-assisted hatches, which can possibly result in a weaker bird than a bird that hatches on its own. Generally, I wouldn’t allow a broody bird to sit on double-yolked fertilized eggs if I could help it, because I don’t think they are a sign of optimum fertility in the sense that the odds are they will not result in new life.