What came first? The chicken or the egg? It is one of life’s unanswerable questions. An equally important question that can be answered however is how you like your eggs? Whether they are fried, scrambled, poached, boiled or maybe even raw, it is a very personal choice and can make or “break” a good meal depending on the quality of these little, fragile packages of golden nutrients. It doesn’t matter how you prefer your eggs in the morning we all agree that for our breakfast to really hit the spot we need to start with high quality, fresh, rich, yellow, free-range, beautiful eggs.
Egganic is a small business, providing perfect organic, pastured, nutrient dense eggs. When searching for high quality free-range eggs, labelling can be both frustrating and confusing. Egganic is a company you can trust when it comes to happy, healthy chooks, truly free ranging. They source organic mash for their chickens to feed on and allow them to roam freely, getting plenty of exercise and sunlight as they should. This helps ensure all chooks are receiving an abundance of necessary vitamins, minerals and protein, resulting in the healthiest eggs.
Egganic have recently moved their chooks to beautiful Mangrove Mountain which is an hour north of Sydney. The eggs are collected by hand every morning, cleaned, graded by weight, packaged and stored in a cool room. The whole process is completed within the morning, which ensures that the eggs maintain maximum freshness. Egganic sell out of their eggs every week. This means that they never store eggs for longer than 7 days. In fact their eggs have generally been consumed by the customer before most other eggs finally make it to the shelves of their retail outlets!
Jacqui from Egganic has given us even more reason to be excited about these tasty golden gems below:
Where did the inspiration behind Egganic come from?
We wanted to give consumers a new choice – pasture raised eggs from happy healthy chooks. We had a small property and needed to come up with something that we could graze on small acreage. Pasture raised chooks for eggs was a great solution.
What makes your products different from other similar ones currently on the market?
Because we are a small producer we are always able to bring freshness and quality to our product. We only run 300 chooks to the hectares which far exceeds the organic standard of 1,500. Our product is certified by Humane Choice whose main concern is the treatment of the bird. We are subject to strict audits and we also feed the chooks organic feed.
What are some of the benefits we can gain from eating free range, organic eggs as opposed to commercial factory farming?
A product which comes from a happy healthy chook must be good for you packed full of necessary vitamins, minerals and protein. Our chooks get exercise and sunlight and eat a diet which they chose so that has to be a good thing.
What is your favourite recipe using eggs?
I can’t go past a frittata – one that you add what ever you have left over in the fridge. Great hot or cold. Perfectly poached eggs are so easy when using fresh eggs and are really yummy too.
What does the company have in stall for the future?
To grow other products such as meat birds and other products related to ethical pasture production.
Although we may never know if the chicken hatched the egg or the egg hatched the chicken – one thing we can be certain of is that we simply can not have a delicious, nutritious, large, golden egg with out a happy, healthy, well fed, nutrient rich chicken. In the mean time why not drop into The Health Emporium and ponder over the “chicken or the egg” mystery a little more while whipping up one of those deliciously appetising frittatas.
Written by Prue Rustean
