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Not all chicken yolks look the same. Some are pale yellow and some are so orange they’re almost red.
But what does that mean? There is egg yolks like lettuce where darker color indicates more nutrients?
Fox News Digital spoke with an egg expert to solve the case.
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The color of a chicken’s yolk, cookbook author and backyard chicken expert Lisa Steele told Fox News Digital, “depends entirely on the chicken’s diet.”
Steele, who lives in Maine, is the creator of Fresh Eggs Daily, a website about raising chickens. She is also an author “The Daily Fresh Egg Cookbook.”
Chicken egg yolks come in a variety of colors, from pale yellow to dark orange. (iStock)
“Foods high in xanthophyll and carotene, which are basically pigments called carotenoids, will make a beautiful dark orange egg yolks“, she said.
According to her, carotene is found in orange-colored foods such as carrots, mangoes, cantaloupe and pumpkins.
Xanthophyll can be found in leafy green vegetables such as spinach and kale.
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But while a darker yolk doesn’t mean the hen is eating a nutritious, organic or fresh diet, “it’s likely to correlate because pigmented foods are also packed with other nutrients,” she said.
Despite this, feed companies and commercial egg farms have found workarounds to produce a darker egg yolk without them. foods rich in nutrients– said Steele.
The color of the egg yolk depends entirely on the chicken’s diet, according to the expert. A diet with more carotene and xanthophylls will produce a darker yolk. (iStock)
These companies “got smart and realized that consumers want to see a bright orange yolk, so they’ll add things like calendula, paprika, sea kelp, corn (and) alfalfa to ‘artificially’ enhance the color of the yolk,” she said .
To provide the most nutritious eggs maybe, Steele suggests customers look for specific labels on cartons at the grocery store.
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“Pasture-raised” or “free-range” chickens tend to lay eggs with a darker, more orange yolk, Steele said, “because their diet is mostly grass, weeds and other plants.”
It’s important to note that “cage-free” and “pasture-raised” are not the same thing, she said.
The expert said free-range chickens usually have a more varied diet, resulting in a darker egg yolk. (iStock)
Pasture-raised eggs are the “gold standard,” Steele told Fox News Digital, noting that some cage-free chickens can still live out their lifespan in a warehouse.
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Eggs with raising chickens on pastures have less cholesterol and more nutrients, Steele said, because of their healthier and more varied diet.
Not only yolks are of different colors.
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The shells are also different.
Unlike the yolk, the color of the shell has nothing to do with the egg’s nutritional value, Steele said.
The color of the eggshell has nothing to do with the nutritional value of the egg. (Yuliy Zazulya/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
The color is “purely based on the breed of chicken,” Steele said.
“Some chickens have brown dye, some have blue, and some don’t.”
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And it’s not a yolk.
