Another Lesson on Eggs

Lets talk eggs again.  Eggs are a marvelous wonder in packaging,  not to mention the inner workings of the egg.  Some people think when they see that white squiggly thing in their eggs that it is fertilized.  This is wrong.  That white squiggly thing is actually called the chalaza and acts as a bungie cord to help stabilize the yolk so it does not bang around and break apart.  Here is a picture of the all the sections of an egg.  I bet you did not know they all existed.

There is a larger air pocket at the rounder end of the egg.  If a peep were to be developing its head is always at this end.  This is so that as the peep develops and gets bigger it can breath that air stored in that end of the egg.  Eggs are complicated but at the same time wonderfully simple environments.  As you can see from the diagram above there are two distinct sections of the egg white: the thick albumin, and the thin albumin.  This is very visible when you fry an egg.  Part of the white in runnier and spreads out while closer to the yolk the white is thicker and stays in place without running all over the pan.

Some may see that whitish dot on the yolk and think it is fertilized.  This is also wrong.  All eggs have that dot.  As you can see from the top picture that is called the Blastodisc.  The purpose of the blastodisc is to allow fertilization if male sperm is introduced to it.  If an egg is fertilized there will be a faint but distinct donut ring around the blastodisc as is seen in the picture below.  This will not alter the taste or texture of the egg.

If you keep the fertilized egg warm and rotate them, they will develop into embryos and hopefully hatch in healthy peeps.  I do not hatch my own eggs.  I prefer to buy day old peeps.  I do have a rooster but he is not the more charismatic guy so he does not hit home runs with the hens consistently.  I would end up wasting a lot of eggs and time trying to incubate eggs from this group.

So today's lesson we learned that the white squiggly thing is not a fertilized egg it is a bungie cord for the yolk,  That little plain white dot on the yolk is not fertilized it is the blastodisc, and my rooster needs dating lessons to improve his luck with the ladies.