Giant egg report

I promised I'd write about the occasional giant eggs that the chickens lay. One of the chickens (we think maybe Tweedy) laid an absolute monster a few weeks ago. Because it takes months for eggs to go bad, we just kept it in the fridge until we got around to photographing, hardboiling, and dissecting it.

Recently I remembered that darn giant egg I was stockpiling. Here is the size comparison- on the right side is a normal sized egg. You can clearly see this egg is especially large!

After I took the photo, I hard boiled a bunch of eggs to make egg salad. Before I got too involved with the salad, I did remember to cut the giant egg in half and photo document the results. Results? Two yolks! This is pretty normal for free range chickens, especially in small flocks. One of our friends even found a triple yolker from one of her hens. That has to hurt coming out, I would think.

For the curious- A double yolk or a triple yolk is a mistake of the hen's reproductive tract. The yolk gets made first, then the white gets wrapped around it, and then the shell. It is kinda like an assembly line. In this case, two yolks get accidentally wrapped in one white, and then the shell just ends up encompassing the whole thing. Also, you would never get fraternal twin chicks tucked into the egg somehow- the egg is large, but it is not big enough to allow for two fully grown chicks at hatching age. The poor little twins would not survive.



I ate the whole thing, by the way. Delicious!