These Eggs Taste Yellow

Last week, on Wednesday morning, someone in the office had the genius to cook up some eggs for breakfast. He took half a dozen down to the canteen, broke them into a bowl and microwaved them to perfection. We had scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in a style which I believe the Italians call 'al desko'. A conversation followed about why were they so yellow, they even tasted yellow; almost theatrically yellow. I figured it was down to the grass in the hens diet and left it at that.

I didn't give it much more thought until Sunday breakfast when the same topic arose. Milo proposed that they were yellow because Daddy puts mustard in the scrambled eggs. Sabine had a slightly less surreal explanation. She suggested that they became yellow if Lucky sat on them. (She's our resident broody hen.)

I figured I should be able to come up with some better theories. It must have something to do with the feed and environment. Firstly, hens require a large volume of good clean water. Since eggs are mostly water and protein. These chooks have their water mains pressured to a header tank and delivered to gravity fed drinking trays.

Then there is the protein. This comes from their layers pellets which are 17% protein. The feed comes from Hi-Peak feeds in Derbyshire. They mill the cereals and package into sacks for delivery on a pallet. It is strictly non-GM and contains the following ingredients. Wheat, non-GM hi-protein soya, calcium carbonate, prairie meal, linseed, vitamins and minerals.

Your regular factory farmed free range hens stop about there. Water and layers pellets are sufficient for a healthy diet. Guerrilla hens go a little further and add two other ingredients. Mixed corn is fed ad-lib. The hens love it but it's protein content is on the low side at 10.5% and if protein intake drops then egg production can slow down. The principle components are whole wheat, split maize and organic soya oil. The maize is bright yellow!

Finally, there is fresh grass. Guerrilla Hens forage on fresh grass, a system of electric nets means that they can regularly be moved to fresh pasture. Factory farmed free range means up to 2,500 birds per hectare and very little will grow under such high stocking density.
These Guerrilla Hens have plenty of space to rummage in the undergrowth. I believe it is the treats they find while foraging, together with the grass that gives them the depth of flavour sometimes called yellow.

Abbot's Ride Farnham

If you live on Abbot's Ride you may have recently been visited by the Easter Bunny. Please enjoy the eggs and savour their yellow egginess. If you would like to receive repeat deliveries please drop me an email: daddy.coombs@googlemail.com

Angelique Does Guerrilla Marketing

If you have been lucky enough to meet Angelique recently she may have given you a curious gift of some eggs. Here is the flyer that I should have attached to the egg box!

Positive Psychology in a Sub-prime Age

Over the last 2 years the external shocks in the financial markets have ground most of us down on more than one occasion. The frequency, magnitude and persistence of gloomy news has been unrelenting. So much of this is outside of any one person's control (Gordon included), the collapsing property markets, the vol-o-caust in vol markets, the inversion of euro 10/30s, CDS basis, yen basis swaps... the moves are so extreme as to leave the participants crushed by a feeling of powerlessness like tiny surfers on a tidal wave.

While one can't control the financial catastrophes I have noticed some people are finding pride elsewhere, doing things that they very much can control. An enthusiasm for growing vegetables, baking, getting fit, learning to swim and even guerrilla farming.

One such venture is that of a friend of mine. He has created a wonderful small business around vintage images of Land Rovers. http://www.vintimage.co.uk

And here is something that I've taken some pride from this weekend. A monster pile of logs which I was then able to stand back and admire with a large mug of vintimage tea. I might not be able to save the free world from impending financial implosion but I can make a big stack of logs and do it with a sense of satisfaction.At Mega-bank last Friday I was privileged to attend a seminar on positive psychology presented by Shawn Achor of Harvard University. I cant possibly summarise his 3 hour discourse and do it justice but the end result is something like, don't look at what you haven't got - focus of what you have and be grateful for it. I may have been the victim of some brainwashing scheme but it seems to be working for me.

Here are a few of the wonderful things that I was able to appreciate this weekend.

What could possibly beat the simple pleasure of finding a person sized whole in the garden while out feeding the pigs on a sunny spring morning. Milo thought that the only way you could top that for fun was to try leaping over it.

So there's #1 gratitude, the joy of finding holes and leaping over them.

Here's #2. Sascha Coombs has been top helper all weekend. He helped rebuild the potting shed on Saturday by passing me tools and countless screws and nails, 'dish juan Daddy' And he has tirelessly campaigned to go to see the pigs. Here he is, helping out again.

And gratitude #3 is Milo. I think he might also have received some brain realignment recently. Last week he started to come home from school and insist on riding his bike, playing with his sister and going for walks in the woods. Something about getting stars and 25 stars apparently gets a DS game. I'm not sure he always remembers to collect the stars but either way, he has been angelic.

Gold Rush and the Petaluma Colony System

The Petaluma colony system is an outdoor production system for egg layers named after an attractive Californian City in Sonoma County. A fertile and wholesome place, the town really began to prosper at the beginning of the gold rush in 1849. The area soon became the centre of a rapidly growing poultry industry serving the growing metropolitain districts. A temperate climate, lush farmland and proximity to the urban population of San Francisco made it perfectly suited to poultry production. It was at one time known at the "Egg Capital of the World" and the home to the inventor of the first modern egg incubator in 1879. (The Egyptians had beaten him by a few thousand years).

The egg laying industry of Petaluma was based around family run farms each with several thousand hens. The Californian poultry farmers hit upon the following system of production which is regaining popularity today. The hens live in colonies of around 200 birds. Each colony is served by a common feeding area, a communal egg laying house and a drinking station. The colony is sleeps in movable roosting houses containing around 50 hens each. The key aim of the Petaluma system is to maximise the peace and harmony within the flock while minimising the labour inputs. I have tried to implement this labour saving system on our small-holding; it suits the dawn and dusk raids by the guerrilla farmer. With a single feed point, the hoppers can be filled once a week from the back of a tractor (or horse drawn cart). In an age before pressurised running water, having a single drinking point was also a labour saving ruse. In our case we have a mains pressured trough linked to gravity fed waterers

In the roosting house, roost bars are 24 inches above bare ground where the manure accumulates for a few weeks until the house is towed to fresh ground. The manure is removed to the compost heap and ultimately finds its way to the vegetable garden. The roosting houses were traditionally very open structures, often a simple roof with walls sheltering three sides and almost completely open on the fourth. This leaves the sleeping birds quite exposed to predators but the large flow of fresh air keeps them healthy. Birds suffer more than most creatures from respiratory illness so a closed structure with damp air is to be avoided. Our roosting house is very similar with an over-sized roof and wide ventilation gaps on three sides.

The benefit of splitting the sleeping quarters from the egg laying nest boxes are two-fold. The manure is kept a good distance from the eggs and the egg gathering by the farmer is all from one place. During the day, the hens lay their eggs in a spotless laying house stacked high with nest boxes each brimming with clean wood-shavings and sawdust. The wood-shavings dry out muddy feet keeping the eggs picture perfect. The nest boxes have been fashioned from wooden wine cases. The names of the finest vineyards known to humanity furnish the insides of our laying house; a generous gift from my oenophilic neighbour. It is kept dark inside the laying house. The smell of the dry wood-shavings and all those wine cases makes it a special place to go hunting for hen-fruit on a sunny afternoon.

Modern practitioners of the colony system advocate a line of electric fencing to keep predators from the roosting house. Since our small-holding is on the edge of town we see rather a lot of foxes, so I decided to build a 9 strand electric fence as the perimeter of a one acre grassy plot. After several weeks' success things started to go wrong in December. The fox enjoyed hopping through the wires and was helping himself to a feathery breakfast of chicken sushi. After one attack on 'the colony', the hens also decided to start darting through the wires if only to escape from Charlie. I have since gone back to electric netting which has done the job of keeping the birds in and fox out. To further defend against night-time raids from badgers, mink, owls etc I have fitted light-activated electronic door openers. With some weeks of training, the hens now put themselves to bed at dusk and wait patiently for the doors to open in time for breakfast. I'm considering investing in a child sized version for the house.

For further reading on Alternative Poultry Production Systems and Outdoor Access http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/poultryoverview.html#layers

La Copper Marans

The egg laying flock currently numbers around 60 birds. The dominant breed is the Marans at about 45 birds all at 6 months old and just coming into their first lay. These birds arrived as day old chickens last September. They hatched in Belgium in the morning, travelled by truck, ferry and white van to arrive with us by tea time.
They are not a particularly rare breed but are certainly uncommon in the UK and North America. The breed originates from the town of Marans in the west of France and remains a popular breed throughout France to this day. The unique feature of the Marans is its ability to lay chocolate-brown coloured eggs. Its a bit of a gimmick but important in the constraints it places on the grower. In order to produce such a rich mahogany shell the hen has to produce these pigments internally and so far no one has been able to genetically speed up this process. Therefore the breed has an upper limit to the number of eggs a hen might produce in a year; around 250. A commercial flock of genetic super hens can expect a laying rate of 325 per year.
With these French birds on the equivalent of a 35 hour week, you can at least be sure that they're enjoying life and not worrying unduly about their laying responsibilities.

They share their roosting shed with 8 Ixworth hens and a large Ixworth cockerel. These are large white utility birds, know for their fine table qualities and their wonderful cream shelled eggs. Being dual purpose these should be laying something like 220 eggs per year. They are currently laying quite a good number of smallish Farrow & Ball New White eggs.The balance of the flock have a different roosting house and are the remains of last summer's flock after several fox attacks through the winter. Charlie, the fox, left us with three Light Sussex, two large Ixworth hens and an elegant Dorking cock. If you find an enormous double yolker in your egg box then there is every chance that it came from one of these more mature ladies.

Egg Production Inches Forward

Two-dozen eggs this weekend and I've printed some labels for the packaging. First two cash sales were made on Friday morning, thanks goes to Pete K and Andrew Mac. Other orders will be filled as soon as I can make the hens lay faster...

Ham Archaeology, the Wood-ash Cure.

This weekend we had the pleasure of being invited to Margo and Jerry's for raclette. Fresh back from the snow in Chamonix, our hostess had very kindly brought back all the right ingredients for a splendid meal. I was tasked with slicing the speck on the big meat slicer. Since I had the slicer spinning I thought it was an appropriate time to crack open the wood-ash cured ham from 2007.

This was one of the first air dried hams we had made. Our very first pigs were Oxford Sandy and Blacks.

They were four, very friendly gilts. Loved a good back rub and would roll over for a tummy tickle in an instant. Milo enjoyed chasing them and being chased by them all summer long. They spent the summer and early autumn running through bracken and making dens in the sunniest clearings where they lounged around like sleeping lions. (That should have been a clue that I was over feeding them).

In due course they reached a good size and took the short one-way road trip to sunny Farnborough. That weekend, Angelique, Rob, Fothers, Meyrick and I set about turning them into hams, salamis and sausages. We all opted to have a go at making our own air dried hams which involved packing a ham in salt for some weeks under weights of about 2.5 times the weight of the ham. The hams then hung in a dry and draughty place for a few months.

As far as I remember, the results were a bit mixed. I think everyone said they liked their hams but I'm not sure they all got completely eaten. On the whole they were too salty and too well cured. I think most favourably described as a 'rustic Serrano'. There was also some confusion around whether to cover in lard and spices before hanging or after.

Anyway, I had made two of these rustic serrano hams. We ate one over the next few months and I followed some old sage's advice and packed the second ham in ash for the next 12 months. And here it is...

A bit musty after all this time but not putrid. I brushed it down and then cleaned up the explosion of mess I'd made in the 'charcuterie room'.

Here it is sliced open. I had to hunt around for a solid section. Any bits with folds or air pockets looked a bit manky. I think it would have been better to have either used more weights or cure it bone in with an injection cure around the bone. Something I think Bod and Rob are experimenting with on their most recent hams.

And here is the finished product. Looks great but I'm afraid it is still brutally salty and doesn't taste much different for all the time it spent in wood-ash. I think that it could be because it was so completely cured when it went in, there was very little moisture left and hence very little exchange of cure and moisture between the outside and the centre.While the outcome was mildly disappointing I will have to wait on the more recent experimental research for the other members of the Ham Team. However, the ham from Chamonix was superb and an excellent reminder of how much harder it is to make this stuff than it first appeared. It goes exceedingly well with cheese too.

Ready, steady, go eggs

The autumn chicks have finally laid their first eggs. 50 Marans and 8 Ixworth hens are all coming into lay at once and yesterday we collected their first efforts. Its the beginning of what could become a deluge, we gathered a solitary brown egg from a Maran and two cream coloured Ixworth eggs. They're still a bit small but perfectly formed.

Together with the rest of the flock (Light Sussex) we could be in collecting 4-5 dozen eggs a day through the summer. I hope to be able to sell them as fast as they're laid. So far I've got requests in from friends and colleagues from far and wide. My daily commute to London could see me weighed down with baskets of eggs. When the anarchists start boarding trains looking for greedy bankers my farmer disguise will come in handy. It is already a well established routine that I leave a trail of straw and pig manure through the train. It amuses my train buddies James and Robert enormously.

If the egg trade is slow I've been working on some baked goods recipes. Portuguese custard tarts and Coconut Macaroons. Having baked three batches this week I'm getting better at the tarts (the first batch when straight from cooling rack to bin). Trouble is, they don't use nearly enough eggs, 4 yolks for the custard and 4 whites for the macaroons. Any other egg recipes? Please leave your suggestions in the comments...