I Have Big Eggs
(Double duck eggs from Yangzhou, China)
The other day my friend Coco came through with an interesting weird meat oddity from her hometown Yangzhou. There's a town near Yangzhou called Gaoyou and a lake near there called Gaoyou Lake. And at this lake there are weird ducks.
Well, they're not really weird, they're just free-range and healthy. That's cool. I wish all ducks were like this.
They're called "Gaoyou maya," which means "sparrow-duck" because their feathers are reminiscent of sparrow bird feathers. Quite attractive, I believe.
It's their eggs that are weird. They're big like goose eggs. (Here's a photo of 2 of these big duck eggs, next to a brown chicken egg)...
The yolks are a bright orange-red color, and an unusually high proportion of them are double-yolked. The double-yolked eggs are prized so they've set up an industry that finds these double-eggs with x-ray equipment. That way the lucky consumer is guaranteed a double-yolk upon demand.
Why are they double-yolked? The assumption is because of their exercise routine and their diet. These athletic ducks dive deep for the abundant and clean fresh-water shellfish found in the region.
We cracked open 3 of these large eggs, and each of them had two yolks. Would-be future twins? Two-headed ducks? We cooked the first egg (eh, should this be plural?) sunny-side up. It tasted like a chicken egg but more dense and flavorful. Good with salt, pepper and chili sauce. Then we scrambled the next one (eh, two?) with a cucumber. And the third double-egg was, well, a little too weird. The yolks were kind of hard and the egg white part was very watery. So we sent that one to duck heaven without eating it.
Thanks to Coco for sourcing this double duck egg. I've been encouraging her to list "Weird Meat Research Assistant" on her resume. Good idea, right?
Recent find: Four yolks in Guangdong egg
Labels: china
posted by Michael @ 10:55 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Our chickens (on my mother's farm) would often produce double yolks - I thought it might be the free range diet.
It was only about 10 percent of the time, however.
Chinese mooncakes sometimes used salted double-yolk eggs. I assume the mass manufacturers now just cheat and use the yolks of two single-yolk eggs.
Kudos on your site, btw. I stumbled across it and love reading about your adventures! :)
This is how Wikipedia.com explains double-yolkers:
"Some hens will lay double-yolked eggs as the result of unsynchronized production cycles. Although heredity causes some hens to have a higher propensity to lay double-yolked eggs, these occur more frequently as occasional abnormalities in young hens beginning to lay.[citation needed] Usually a double-yolked egg will be longer and thinner than an ordinary single-yolk egg. Double-yolked eggs only rarely, and even then only with human intervention, lead to the successful development of two embryos."
An egg seller in Southern Sweden used to sell double yolked chicken eggs and I loved them but a bit impractical sometimes when you need just one yolk for certain recipes. Then you'll have to store the other yolk somewhere or waste it. As for duck egss, I love those salted in charcoal paste as is done by the Chinese.
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