The other day at lunch, I bought a salad from my work cafeteria, which I do quite frequently. They are chef salads so they usually include meat, cheese, tomato, black olive, and an egg. Pretty typical, right? However, there was something about this particular salad that wasn't typical. My egg had a white yolk!?!?
I have never seen or heard of this before, neither had any family or friends that I asked. I tried to scrape away at the top of it to see if there was any color deeper into the yolk; nope there was none. Of course, I did what most people do when faced with something unusual, Google. ha ha. Expecting hundreds of result pages to pop up, with unlimited amounts of information, (like on most searches) I was surprised to see there wasn't really any!? I found ONE site with decent results, but not facts, just shared experiences! The site was another blog that had discussed how the blogger ran into the same strange anomaly. It had many comments of people turning to Google for an answer about this oddity, but finding nothing concrete to explain it. From the comments, I gathered that its pretty rare. Some people had guessed that it had to do with what certain chickens are fed. Another commenter guessed it was some sort of genetic disorder, like albinism. There was also people from some different countries that mentioned that you can specifically buy colorless/white yolk eggs, but that they are more expensive, and even they didn't know how or why they got to be white.
(Picture from Andy B, http://johnsadventures.com/archives/2007/07/i_thought_egg_yolks_were_yellow/)
The majority of people that ran across them didn't eat them, especially since they couldn't find much information on why they were that color. I didn't eat my egg! ha ha! No one wanted to risk it and get sick! There was a commenter that did eat it and said he didn't get sick or see any side effects of it, just mentioned that the flavor wasn't as good. My egg was already hard boiled, but the people that encountered a raw white egg yolk said that it was much tougher and had a thicker membrane. Eww! That does NOT sound appetizing.
Has anyone else ever ran across this? Can anyone tell me facts on what causes the egg yolk to be white?
Eggs-tra curious (hehe) - AllieBe
That's interesting . . . I've never seen a white egg yolk.
ReplyDeleteOne point is, the colour of the yolk is caused by carotenes in the feed..absolutely white egg yolks occur when the liver o the chicken isn´t working properly.
ReplyDeleteLiver and especially the bile are needed to digest fat soluble vitamins, as beta carotene is one.
Without bile no beta carotene is absorbed and the egg yolk is really white, purely white, not even a hue of yellow.
If you have eggs with a very pale yellow, it mostly is the feed, especially in commercial kept hens without access to beta carotene rich plants and insects.
In free range hens who forage outside a white yolk occurs nearly always with liver problems.
Liver problems can occur through blockage of the bile ducts, or also through worms and oter parasites