[a medicinal cooking blog: using food as medicine to treat whatever may ail you]

Thursday, September 16, 2010

A Duck's Egg


I wanted to share the good news on duck eggs (which I already loved). While a free range farm fresh chicken egg is a wonderful source of protein and nutrition, duck eggs are even higher in concentrated amounts of vitamin A and D, manganese, zinc, copper, potassium, sodium, phosphorous, calcium, and iron. This also means they are higher in cholesterol, though it is considered the "good" cholesterol i.e. monounsaturated fats. Duck eggs are an alkaline food while chicken eggs are more on the acidic side. If you are allergic to chicken eggs, you usually will not be to duck eggs. And, eggs are the perfect protein, full of high quality essential amino acids. Does it get any better? That is, if you love eggs to begin with.

In Chinese Medicine, eggs are considered yin in nature, nourishing all that is liquid in the body, such as blood and essential fluids. Eggs are thermally neutral which means they are neither warming nor cooling and can be ingested by people who are at one extreme of the spectrum or the other. Eggs are an excellent food for fertility purposes, both before (pre-conception) and post partum. According to P. Pitchford (Healing With Whole Foods), eggs should be avoided in an overly damp condition (i.e. someone who is very overweight or if you have a mucus overload).

I like to poach or make soft boiled duck eggs and serve them over a salad or a tender meaty dish like I did before the summer started in this pork chop braise. Once it got warmer, out came a salad of radicchio, chick peas, carrots, and onions with a lovely soft boiled sweet duck egg on top. Apparently you can also bake with duck eggs, though I can't share any recipes on baking as it's not my forte. I drizzled a tangy vinaigrette over the salad which consisted of : olive oil, honey, sea salt, fresh crushed black pepper, dijon mustard, and rice vinegar. Delicious.


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