Interesting Odds & Ends about Eggs

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•Howard Helmer, former American Egg Board representative, is the Omelet King. Helmer holds three Guinness World Records for omelet making – fastest omelet-maker (427 omelets in 30 minutes); fastest single omelet (42 seconds from whole egg to omelet); and omelet flipping (30 flips in 34 seconds).
•The name meringue came from a pastry chef named Gasparini in the Swiss town of Merhrinyghen. In 1720, Gasparini created a small pastry of dried egg foam and sugar from which the simplified meringue evolved. Its fame spread and Marie Antoinette is said to have prepared the sweet with her own hands at the Trianon in France.
•To tell if an egg is raw or hard-boiled, spin it. Because the liquids have set into a solid, a hard-boiled egg will easily spin. The moving liquids in a raw egg will cause it to wobble.
•Double-yolked eggs are often produced by young hens whose egg production cycles are not yet completely synchronized. They’re often produced too, by hens which are old enough to produce Extra Large-sized eggs. Genetics is also a factor. Occasionally a hen will produce double-yolked eggs throughout her egg-laying career. It’s rare, but not unusual, for a young hen to produce an egg with no yolk at all.
•An egg roll can be any one of three very different things: 1) an Asian specialty, usually served as an appetizer, in which a savory filling is wrapped in an egg-rich dough and then deep-fat fried, 2) an annual Easter event held in many places, including the White House lawn and 3) an elongated hard-boiled egg made for the foodservice industry. When the long egg roll is sliced with a special slicer, every piece is a pretty center cut.
•It is said that an egg will stand on its end during the spring (vernal) equinox (about March 21), one of the two times of the year when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are of equal length everywhere. Depending on the shape of the egg, you may be able to stand it on its end other days of the year as well.
•Long before the days of refrigeration, the ancient Chinese stored eggs up to several years by immersing them in a variety of such imaginative mixtures as salt and wet clay; cooked rice, salt and lime; or salt and wood ashes mixed with a tea infusion. The treated eggs bore little similarity to fresh eggs, some exhibiting greenish-gray yolks and albumen resembling brown jelly. Today, eggs preserved in this manner are enjoyed in China as a delicacy.
•You really can have egg on your face. As egg white tends to be drying, it has long been used as a facial. Egg yolks are used in shampoos and conditioners and, sometimes, soaps. Cholesterol, lecithin and some of the egg’s fatty acids are used in skin care products, such as revitalizers, make-up foundations and even lipstick.

Source www.incredibleegg.org American Egg Board

Variables affecting your hatch

Many people decide to hatch chicks themselves, from either fertile eggs they gather themselves, or purchase from others. Aside from the incubation process itself, there are other factors that can affect your hatch. Here is a list of some things to consider.
1. The age of the breeder or chicken that produced the egg you are incubating.
2. Fertility of the eggs you are setting.
3. The length of holding time on the eggs before you start incubating.
4. The environment of the area you are holding the eggs (temperature/humidity, etc.) prior to incubating.
5. The physical quality of the eggs you are setting (cracks, soiling, shape of the egg).

All of the above are things you should be aware of prior to setting eggs in your incubator. Here at Welp Hatchery, we take into account all of these things, plus the actual incubation process when we project our hatches (how many chicks we think will hatch in our incubators for each set). When you keep detailed information about these things, it allows you to make hatch projections a lot closer to what your actual hatch numbers are. However, even with great documentation, we never project our hatches perfectly. Like they say, you really can’t count your chickens before they hatch!