A Few Common Questions About Duck Eggs For Eating

There's no way to tell a freshly laid fertile egg from an infertile one without the help of a high-powered microscope. There is no noticeable difference in taste, looks, or shelf-life.

One sometimes finds eggs with small “blood-spots” in them, usually on the yolk. This has nothing to do with fertility. It simply means that a small blood vessel broke in the hen's oviduct while the egg was being formed. Some of the blood gets on the yolk and then it continues on its merry way. The shell is formed around the egg last.

The embryo of a fertile egg is at a *very* early stage of development when the egg is laid (like at the 16- or 32-cell stage or something). It's way too small to be seen with the naked eye. When the egg is laid, development stops (is suspended) until the hen is ready to sit on her nest (which could be as much as 2 weeks after the first egg is laid).

If the egg gets too cold for too long (like in a fridge) the embryo will die. It doesn't affect its value as food.

When the hen goes broody and starts to sit on the nest full-time, development resumes and within 24-48 hours an experienced eye can tell if an egg is fertile without cracking it open (there is still no identifiable “baby” in there).

Since our flocks are co-ed most of our eggs are probably fertile. We've eaten these eggs for twenty years and never noticed any difference between fresh-fertile vs fresh-infertile. I collect eggs each morning so they are freshly laid.

Since most birds only lay an egg a day (some, like geese lay only every other day), most birds who set on their eggs in clutches (more than one egg) must lay eggs that can stop developing without dying. The first egg may be laid two weeks before the last egg - they all still need to hatch on the same day. All of the eggs are at roughly the same stage of development when laid (something like the 16- or 32-cell stage). Once laid, they cool and go into a suspended state of development. They can stay viable (alive) this way for as much a two weeks. At some point the mother bird decides it' time to start sitting on the nest full-time (she goes “broody”), and the eggs all start up again. The egg needs temperatures in the 39C range to resume growth.

There are a few birds who begin to sit on their eggs as soon as they are laid: the penguin is one - for obvious reasons. They live someplace where the eggs would surely freeze if they didn't do this. Another is the owl. Owls lay two or three eggs, and the babies are born a day or two apart. Often, the third baby doesn't make it, because it's so much smaller then the other two.

I “candle” our eggs : shine a light through them to look for abnormalities inside (like blood-spots) as well as hairline cracks in the shell. We generally don't eat those. (in commercial production these eggs often go to bakeries and others who use eggs as ingredients)

We've eaten eggs as much as 3 months old. After 1-2 months you get the occasional egg that goes 'off'. They are pretty easy to spot because they go dark inside. If we're in doubt, we just hold it up to a light. Mostly you DON'T want to crack open an egg that's gone off. They smell pretty loud. (It's also often possible to tell a bad egg by smelling the shell. You pretty much have to smell a few good eggs first so you know what they're supposed to smell like since it wouldn't occur to most people to smell an egg.)

You can get a pretty good idea about the freshness of an egg by 2 things:

1. The size of the air cell inside (it gets bigger as the moisture inside the egg evaporates) - fresh eggs have very small air cells (size of a dime is common but not an absolute) 2. How easy it is to peel when hard-boiled - fresh eggs are near impossible to peel cleanly: the white tends to stick to the shell. (For more information on freshness, check the candling pages.)

With chicken eggs it takes 7-10 days (in the fridge or not) before they'll peel nicely. Duck eggs take longer (2-3 weeks) and goose eggs longer still.

Apparently in Australia eggs are not refridgerated in stores. If the egg is washed when still fresh there's no reason it needs to be kept in the fridge if it's going to be used within 2-4 weeks. You don't want to store them next to the stove, but we often just keep ours in an ice-cream pail on the counter. A lot of other people do too. I'm told that eggs in the UK are sold unrefridgerated as well. (thanks for this goes to Dan Mauldsley from BBC Radio Cleveland)

See this Mother Earth News article for their results in a long-term storage experiment (spoiler: the unwashed, fertile farm eggs stored in a sealed conatiner in the fridge kept at least 7 MONTHS!)

There are a few physical differences between chicken and duck eggs:

1. Shells of duck eggs are smoother, less porous, tougher than chicken eggs.
2. There's more colour variation in the shell too. (we're getting some that are bluish and others that are spotted)
3. Duck eggs contain less water so the eggs are thicker (over-cooking can make them a bit “rubbery”)
4. Duck eggs tend to be larger.
5. Duck eggs tend to have bigger yolks (proportional to the size of the egg)

The flavour of an egg depends much more on what the bird eats than who the bird is. Because of the way our birds live, their eggs taste like free-range chicken eggs.

Free-range eggs have a slightly stronger taste and often have darker yolks than grocery-store eggs. In the summer when our birds get to eat lots of green stuff the yolks get pretty (dark) orange. In the middle of winter they're pretty pale unless I feed them rabbit food. Our birds have wading pools to play in but no pond so they don't get to eat fish, frogs, pond scum, or algae. All of these things can make an egg taste funny.

We use our eggs like anyone else. If you like dunking your toast in the yolk of a soft-boiled egg, these are great! By the way, dangers of eating raw eggs as far as picking up salmonella are WAY less with ducks than with chickens, and less with free-range eggs (any kind of bird) from a trusted source than from store-bought. I used to have my flocks tested by the provincial poultry specialist until one year he told me I was wasting my money - he's never seen a case of salmonella in a domestic duck flock.

Nutritionally, free-range eggs tend to be lower in cholesterol and higher in protein and vitamines than store eggs.

My favorite egg recipe is a goose-egg recipe: deviled goose eggs. The ingredients are the same, but it takes about 30 minutes to hard-boil a goose egg and it has to be at least 3 weeks old. Goose eggs are huge (2/3 cup or more) so a single (half) deviled egg is big enough for an appetizer all by itself. You can also make one hell-of-a one-egg omlett!