If you’re like a lot of people, you don’t know a whole lot about eggs beyond hard boiled, over easy and poached. When you find those little stringy things on your sunny-side-up, you think “Eeeeew, how gross, chicken umbilical cord!” Actually, you should be happy to find them, because they’re not what you think.
The working structure of an egg is probably something you’ve never really considered, most people haven’t. Here’s What’s inside your egg and why its there:
• Shell – protects the egg its porous, allowing respiration to occur as gasses pass through the shell.
• Albumen – egg “white” is protein packed, and serves to cushion the egg yolk and provide extra nutrients to the growing embryo in a fertile egg.
• Yolk – Provides most of the nutrition for the developing chick as it develops and for the first few days after hatching.
• Air cell – As an egg ages and loses moisture this grows until it fills about 1/3 of the egg at hatching. The chick breaks into this space at the beginning of the hatching sequence and is able to breather before escaping the shell.
• Chalazae – These are the little white “stringy” things, they anchor the yolk in the middle of the egg, keeping the growing embryo from pressing against the shell.
All of these parts are present in every egg, fertile or not. What you may find interesting is that every egg changes as it ages, the structures begin to soften and break down. You should be happy to find the chalazae in your egg because over time they shrink and pretty much disappear in eggs that are past their prime.
Next time you separate an egg and don’t find that stringy thing, you’ll think “Oh, gross! How old is this egg!?!”
