We all love eggs—whether we’re scrambling them for breakfast, making a sauce with them for dinner, or baking with them for dessert, we all know how versatile and delicious they can be.
But there’s plenty more to these oval marvels than meets the eye! In fact, from the yolk right through to the shell, you’d be surprised at how complex, inspiring and downright historical eggs can be!
50 shades of yellow
When it comes to egg yolks, yellow is always in style. But what the hen eats can greatly affect just how yellow the yolk is when it reaches your plate. Generally speaking if you’re seeing a light yellow yolk, the laying hen would have been dining on wheat, while a slightly darker yolk would be the product of corn.1
That egg shell you’re about to crack open is pretty complex in its own right—it’s actually made out of calcium carbonate, which is the very same ingredient used in certain antacids. Furthermore, that shell basically has its own ventilation system, one that has pores (each egg has between 7,000-17,000 tiny pores, in fact2) designed to let out oxygen, carbon dioxide and moisture.3
Take it out for a spin
Unsure of whether or not that egg in its shell in front of you is cooked or raw? No problem—all you need to do is give it a little spin. If the egg is in fact cooked through, it should spin smoothly. However, if it’s uncooked, you can expect to see it wobble as it turns round and round.4
While there’s still some debate as to whether the chicken or the egg came first, we do know that our feathered, egg-laying friends have been domesticated for a very long time. In fact, wild fowl were first domesticated by East Indian civilization around 3,200 B.C. But the real excitement comes when we first discovered that our farm companions could lay eggs for us to eat—that was discovered in around 1,400 B.C. by the Egyptians and Chinese.5