Pullet Eggs versus Grocery Store Eggs

About six months ago, my husband and I bought six sussex chicks (four speckled and two red). Now, as our feathery friends bloom from chicks into pullets (a pullet is the teenage version of a hen), they have begun to lay eggs!!!

When a pullet begins laying eggs, it’s a lot of fun. At first, the eggs are miniature, off-colored, and sometimes even mutated (I’ve seen two eggs "fused" into one when I was kid raising chickens). And although we haven’t yet witness a mutated egg from our pullets, we have definitely noticed small and off-colored ones!

Here’s a picture of one of our pullets’ eggs (left) next to a store-purchased brown egg (right). Quite a difference! I believe by the time our pullets are laying hen eggs, they will be a darker brown as opposed to their current tannish color.

Here are the eggs hatched open. The one on the left is our pullet’s and the one on the right is the grocery store egg. Besides the volume, do you notice the differences? Take a look at how much clearer the white of the pullet’s egg is and how much more yellow the pullet’s yolk is? This is a perfect illustration of how store-bought eggs are treated for lengthened preservation (by the way, the purchased egg I used for illustration was labeled organic, yet was still apparently treated). It not only detracts from it’s appearance, but the alterations also make grocery store eggs less nutritious. You can read more about the nutrition of store-bought versus home-grown eggs via this post by The Thrifty Mama.

Two of our pullet eggs equal about the same content of one large hen egg. For breakfast this past Saturday morning, I fried five of our pullet eggs for the Mister (I chose not to eat any because, with being pregnant, I am grossed out by eggs at the moment, sigh). He said that our home-grown eggs had a more intense flavor than the store-bought eggs. He also found that the white of the egg was especially tastier than that of the purchased eggs. And he mentioned that the yolk seemed thicker than its grocery store counterpart; however, this could be because I cooked it more than a larger yolk (meaning, it may have been purely a volume matter; it’s smaller, therefore it cooked faster). We’ll have to see how the fully-formed home-grown eggs taste versus a large store-bought egg! Stay tuned!