Colorful Khais

Khai in thai language means "egg". Here in Pattaya, I had a chance to see colorful khais which really amazed me. For someone who have been exposed to white eggs only for all of my life (except those colorful eggs during Easter Egg hunt), it's quite interesting to see, and actually know, that there are other colors of egg out there. I've heard about the blue egg in Europe (but I haven't seen one) but here, I saw brown and pink eggs aside from the usual white eggs. I actually thought they were dyed but they weren't.

So I did a little research about it and found out that when the egg passes through the abdomen of the chicken, the color is applied on top of a white egg. What determines the shade of brown is the “Genetics” of the parents. This brown egg is what they call the organic egg here in Thailand. Actually, this egg can be scraped off quite easily with your finger nail. Now the white eggs where we all filipinos are accustomed to comes from Chickens like the Leghorn. It is just an egg with no color added and the egg shell has no pigment added.

Now the pink egg is quite the mysterious ones. And some say it comes from the gay chickens. That was a funny one! But others say they are preserved eggs. Inside the egg is actually black and the yolk is brownish, similar to century egg. The eggs apparently are preserved in a mixture of lime, clay, salt, and rice hulls for a few weeks, a method of curing eggs dating back hundreds of years. They come from special chickens in the south of Thailand. Pretty interesting, right? I wish to see blue and green eggs someday. Because they do exist!