We give our hens some time off during the winter. By not supplementing their lighting, they stop laying when the days grow short. With days now growing longer, they are starting to lay, but I’ve been buying eggs all winter.
I make our dogs and bird an egg every morning, and I usually have an egg as well. I buy JUMBO eggs. It’s fun to see how many double yolked eggs occur in each dozen. There’s always at least one, but a few times I’ve gotten six. When our hens are laying, they lay mostly LARGE with an occasional JUMBO.
If my gf is doing any baking, she’ll buy boring old LARGE eggs.
If I buy a box of large I get 144 eggs. If I buy Jumbo I only get 100 for a similar price. I have to watch the price though. I think restaurants shy away from jumbos for the same reason I do and sometimes the bulk price on jumbo eggs can be substantially cheaper.
Sorry for the lack of a cite, but over a dozen years ago I remember reading that Extra Large is the best bang in that they have the largest yolk for the money. Going to Jumbo usually just increases the “white” portion.
Large. Used to be Xtra Large or Jumbo but the price differential jumped, and then the larger ones were coming in with much thinner shells resulting in eggs breaking in the carton or making a mess when cracking them open to cook or mix.
I prefer to buy “large” because that’s what’s used in most recipes, and it means I don’t have to make any adjustments. But sometimes the extra large or medium eggs are priced so much better per pound of egg that I buy those. In particular, my local Whole Foods often has a brand of pastured eggs that’s really excellent in quality and much cheaper than the other brands per volume of egg, and when they are available, I often get them, and just deal with the math to adjust recipes.
Prefer jumbos and use extra large as my backup; sometimes the jumbo supply around here is spotty. Mostly I prefer the larger size since I generally eat 1 for breakfast. One jumbo is enough, but 1 large is not. And 2 larges is a bit too much.
I encounter double yolks maybe once per 20 cartons = 240 eggs. If that.
I’m not much of a baker, so adjusting recipes for the size of my eggs just isn’t an issue.
This article discusses where it makes a difference., mostly in baking and cooking in large quantities. It’s not a negligible difference though, a Jumbo is weighs 25% more than a Large. If you eat one or two eggs for breakfast often you’ll notice the difference in size.
Yesterday, I stopped by a Polish grocery store. I’ve been there many times before but usually get just certain things. For the first time, I noticed the huge variey of eggs they offer. They had the usual commodity styro-carton ones in a few sizes but probably 10 or 12 others, many from relatively close farms in Wisconsin. I didn’t buy any but probably will soon. These cartons were mostly around $5/doz.
All my eggs come from Mom’s chickens. They’re not standard sizes, of course, but they tend to be very big: The smallest are usually about a match for jumbos, but every couple of dozen or so, there’s one that’s so big you can’t even close a jumbo carton on it. A couple of times, she’s gotten eggs that were over four ounces each.
Oddly, even with as big as they are, we don’t get many double yolks.
Is she raising a particular breed of chicken? Or does she have some secret?
My neighbor’s chickens lay rather smallish eggs. Some of them are Rhode Island Reds but there are a couple of other varieties, but I think the only category of bird they choose to raise is ‘free’. Most of the home-grown eggs I’ve encountered in my life were on the small side.
She alternates between white and brown hens, to make it easier to keep track of when the old ones stop laying. I’m not precisely sure of the breeds, beyond that. And if she has some sort of secret, she’s not sure what it is, either.
Maybe it’s just an effect of the same agricultural thumb that leads to her having more surplus tomatoes from her garden, then my garden produced in total, even though tomatoes were the main focus of my garden.
I generally buy Jumbo. I do find quite a few double yolks, sometimes 2-3 in he same carton. The exception is if I am going to bake, I then buy Large. Most recipes containing eggs are based on large size eggs.