Strange orange ring in my hens yolks

[Chickie Baby]

I've never heard of an egg steamer, nor of steaming eggs.

There are several ladies at my work that have these little steamers. They seem to do the trick for them. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dash-Go-Rapid-Egg-Cooker/37017598
The steamer shown in the link above, has a device that pokes a small hole in the air sack end of the egg.
I steam eggs in a vegetable steamer basket. I would say steaming works better than boiling fresh eggs, but I still have issues with them being hard to peel. I guess I just haven't gotten the steaming process down to a science yet. You should try it, you might find it works better if you use a lot of hard cooked eggs.

 

[Chickie Baby]

Ever since I started steaming eggs (rather than boiling them) I have noticed that they peel better being fresh and all. I am following this thread, curious to know what caused the ring, I believe it was the crawdadys

USDA Egg grading manual. Page 17.
What they ate 10 to 20 days ago, will affect what they lay today. GC

Thanks for posting this... I fed them the crawfish at least 2+ weeks ago. I really had to think back of what I had tossed over to them when I got the picture. The crawfish was the ONLY thing different I had fed them.

 

[aart]

but I still have issues with them being hard to peel.

Dunking in an ice water bath as soon as steaming is done, bonking it on the fat end to break the shell before ice bath will help even more with peeling.

 

[Chickie Baby]

Interesting... I had an egg yesterday (hard boiled) that had a noticeably orange center (like if you took the orange part from the first photo, and put it inside the ring instead), but it was the only one in the batch that came out like that. Boiled 13 others at the same time and they were all normal. I gave the orange yolk to my dogs, they did not complain.

No crawdads here, I just figured it's a random glitch.

That is odd... do you think it may have been less cooked on on that one? Possibly a larger egg that the very middle didn't cook completely.

 

[rosemarythyme]

That is odd... do you think it may have been less cooked on on that one? Possibly a larger egg that the very middle didn't cook completely.

It's a possibility, I try to keep the eggs moving around in the pot while boiling because I know it heats unevenly, but maybe that one was a larger egg and didn't get as much time on the hotter side. I don't recall any of the eggs being larger than usual though.

 

[NorthTexasWink]

So my mother called to chat and I asked her about this orange ring or orange center in yolks thing. Guess what!? She said ours had all kinds of rings and "sunsets in the egg yolks". Her words. "You remember Cookie (a cousin) was always so good about bringing us redfish and shrimp and all from Beaumont? (We lived in the Brazos valley then, about 100 miles north of Houston.) Well I'd send him off with some eggs and whatever was good in the garden. Those hens always had prettier eggs after we fed them those seafood scraps."

So. Mamma says it's the seafood, and thinks it gets "put in the eggs in layers while the eggs go through that hen's plumbing" layer by layer. So if fed on seafood once, then not again, you'd get a ring like a growth ring in a tree? She thinks yes.

This is the kind of knowledge that gets lost when we lose both contact with our elders and contact with growing our own food.

 

[aart]

"put in the eggs in layers while the eggs go through that hen's plumbing" layer by layer

That kinda makes sense....but as the yolk grows over the however many days it takes to grow big enough for release...hmmmm.

If you fed seafood shells every other day or so, consistently for a week or two, would you get multiple rings?

 

[NorthTexasWink]

@aart I'd like to say "yes", but I think it is more complicated, and simpler, than that. I'm willing to bet money that as the yolk matures in the follicle prior to being released into the oviduct, it is indeed formed in stages. Chemically and mechanically, I think the pigments in there would have a tendency to stratify into zones or possibly even "clumps". As the yolk travels through the system and the albumin is added, it spins, and centrifugal/centripetal force thus would tend to move everything in there around into some sort of gradient pattern. That's when the albumin forms those little ropey tethers of denser white on the ends, called chalazae. If the particles of pigment (Or pigmented fats? Proteins? Water?) are of a consistent size/mass/density, but not identical to the non-pigmented particles, wouldn't they sort themselves into that gradient pattern as a ring? I'm not certain exactly how homogeneous an egg yolk is, being it's roughly equal parts proteins, fats, and water. That detail seems to be hiding from me right now.

I'm hoping I'm getting my idea across adequately. Words is HARD! Maybe someone smarter than I has this answer. I'm old and sometimes I think my brain needs an added memory strip.

Regardless, if you fed seafood only once every week, you might get rings. If you fed it daily, wouldn't all the rings be so big it'd be The whole yolk?

 

[aart]

wouldn't they sort themselves into that gradient pattern as a ring? I'm not certain exactly how homogeneous an egg yolk is,

Not sure if yolk is created by layers/time, creating ring(s), or molecular alignments of differing components at some point in the process from ova to butt nugget.
I dunno<shrugs> was merely, and maybe wildly, speculating.

If you fed it daily, wouldn't all the rings be so big it'd be The whole yolk?

Every day, yes, but every 2-3 days might be different?
Again<shrugs> total speculation.
All is hard to quantify....but we can think about it

I'm hoping I'm getting my idea across adequately. Words is HARD!

You're fine. I tend to use too few words sometimes. I'm old too, RAM is clogged, sluggish, and often misfires. haha!

 

[NorthTexasWink]

My mom did describe the yolks as often looking like "sunsets". Multiple rings, different colors. I was a kid, observant kid, but I had other priorities, as a kid does. I don't remember the "sunsets", just that our eggs were not usually light yellow yolked but deep-yellow-gold-to-orange-to-almost-red.
If different types of shellfish (or seafood?) make different colors or intensity of colors, or if amounts matter, rings? Adding red pepper makes a difference? Cooked versus raw? How much and how often to get a ring? To get the whole yolk deeply pigmented? So many variables! I'm definitely gonna fiddle with this when my hens start laying.
Wild speculation is the only kind worth indulging in!