Well, our wonderful chickens have produced the first egg! As you can see in the photo, it is very dark brown, which makes me guess it might be from our French Copper Maran hen. You can also see, from the key we put in the photo for comparison, that this egg is not very large. This is common for first eggs; pullets lay smaller eggs initially, then larger eggs as they mature.
We wanted to compare our egg to a store bought egg, so we first floated it in a bowl of water. Our brown egg lay on its side on the bottom of the bowl -- a sign of freshness. The store bought egg floated with the blunt side up, showing that it was not as fresh. We had bought the eggs about 10 days earlier, so certainly they weren't as fresh as our own egg.
In the photo of the eggs on the plate, our egg is on the right. You can see how nice and orange the yolk is. This is a sign of a hen given a more natural environment. Ours aren't free range, but they do have a nice outdoor pen, are on dirt that they can scratch for worms, etc., and get plenty of fresh greens from around our property.
But the real test was in the taste. Since there was only one home grown egg, we decided to scramble the eggs so we could both have a good taste. In this photo, the upper pan has two store bought eggs; the lower pan has our home grown egg.
You can see the color difference carried over into the scrambled eggs. the home brown egg was more yellow, and although I tried to scramble them equally, I could swear the home grown egg was fluffier.
And, yes, it was MUCH tastier. It not only tasty on first bite, but it had a longer lasting flavor than the store-bought eggs.
