Origins & Information - (A-Z) Eggs

"How you like your eggs - fried or fertilized?"

Major props and kudos if you know where that quote is from and if you don't, you're in for a funny surprise if you go searching. Anyhow, eggs! They seem almost ubiquitous from breakfast foods to baking ingredients to desserts. The most common egg is, of course, the chicken egg even though there are several other animals that produce eggs commercially. Eggs are made up of a calcium carbonate shell, albumen, and vitellus (yolk). They are quite nutritious and well-liked.

In terms of nutrition, one large egg is approximately 72 calories with 6.3 whole grams of protein (for very detailed nutrition facts, click here)! They provide a lot of health benefits such as healthy weight management through their filling natures, building muscles, contributing choline which helps with pregnancies and preventing birth defects, keeping brain cell membranes strong, and preventing macular degeneration which is the main reason for age-induced blindness. For such a small price, an egg is certainly worth having in your diet because of its health benefits! Though there is a scare about how much cholesterol is in eggs (there's almost a full day's recommended daily allowance in one egg), you should note that it is the egg yolk that contains fat and not the white (no cholesterol or fat, mostly water & proteins).

What seems to makes eggs so well-liked is how versatile they are. Aside from the various ways they can look whether in color or shape, they also can be prepared a multitude of ways. This can lead to a little bit of confusion when you are at a restaurant and your server asks how you'd like your eggs. You could have a favorite, no idea, or a comic remark like Mitch Hedberg said ("Incubated, and then raised, and then beheaded, and then plucked and then cut up then put onto a grill then put onto a bun. Shit, it's gonna take awhile. I don't have time, scrambled!"). Some common ways to have eggs for breakfast are hardboiled, sunny side up, over easy, scrambled, as an omelette, and fried. Other ways to have eggs include deviled and poached. Of course, all of these techniques will have to be demonstrated in future blog posts so you can know the difference!

Fun egg facts

• US Grade AA eggs have thick and firm egg whites and nearly perfect yolks and shells. Grade A and B eggs decrease in quality respectively.
• What the hen eats will determine what color the yolk is.
• On average, a hen lays 250-270 eggs in a year.
• The white parts attached to the yolk's ends are called chalazae and are there to keep the yolk in place; the fresher the egg, the more prominent the chalazae.
• A whole egg is about 3 tbsps of liquid with the yolk being 1 whole tbsp itself.
• Eggs that are not fresh will float in water.

This post is part of an A-Z series I am running for my blog category "Origins and Information" while I am in Vietnam with my family for July. Many of the posts in the series answer questions that were posed by friends/readers. If y'all enjoy the series, I will gladly run another in the future!