Over winter while our girls weren’t laying we were having a soft boiled egg and toasted soldiers for breakfast one day a week. It became one of my favourite breakfasts.
I hadn’t often done this with our girls’ eggs because I thought it would be difficult to judge the timings. However I decided on a bit of trial and error so that I would know for the future and I now have it down to a fine art.
I had to also take into consideration the two different sizes of my eggs. Regular bantam sized for Ebony and Flame and tiny serama sized for the rest of the girls.
It may help others as a starting point and then you can tweak it to suit your own tastes. I like my soft boiled egg to have a firm white but a liquid yolk to dip in. I like my hard boiled eggs to still have just a little softness to them.
With a medium shop bought egg I give them 5 minutes for soft boiled and 10 minutes for hard boiled.
With Ebony and Flame’s eggs I give them 4 minutes for soft boiled and 8 minutes for hard boiled.
With the serama eggs I give them 3 minutes for soft boiled and 6 minutes for hard boiled.
As we get many more serama eggs than the bigger ones it seemed more useful to get the timings right for these. The next problem was what to use as egg cups.
I have loads of regular sized egg cups of course. I have only one bantam sized egg cup that my youngest son gave me one Easter with a chocolate egg in it. It is perfect for Ebony and Flame’s eggs but not much use as there are two of us and only the one egg cup.
The serama eggs drop so low in the bantam sized egg cup that you wouldn’t be able to get at them. I then had a brain wave. I have four sake cups that were also a gift from my youngest son in the days when a lot of my gifts had a chicken theme. They have cockerels on them and sit in my kitchen display cabinet.
The eggs are loose in them but they are low enough to be able to get to the eggs and they actually work fine for us. It’s been nice to have a use for them rather than just decoration.
I have to cut the soldiers a bit thinner to dip in the eggs but this works perfectly. We are having this as our regular mid week breakfast and I love them.
Although the eggs are small you get more yolk ratio with smaller eggs so they are really lovely. I am pleased with myself for solving this. Perfect little eggs every time.
Click here to see the history of my flock.
Lovely little cups, Carol. My wife tends to invert a standard egg cup for our bantam eggs, which then go in the hollow of the base; she also uses an inverted spirits measure with a hollow bottom. Note that I say ‘she’: it’s an embarrassment to admit it, but I don’t eat eggs other than in things like quiche!
Oh my goodness, that is genius! I have just tried it with serama eggs and it works. I would never have thought of that. How on earth did your wife come up with that. I may have to photograph that idea for a future post and will of course credit your wife for the idea. I remember you saying that you don’t eat eggs and I still don’t get it! How can you not like eggs! I love, love them. We have, fried, poached, scrambled, omelette and soft and hard boiled. Can never have too many eggs.
Such a good idea, nice to have all thoes different size cups.
I do have quite an accumulation of egg cups.
The Serama eggs must be the same size as the eggs from my Dutch bantams because they take 3 minutes for a runny yolk too. I have a beautiful wooden bantam egg cup that was my grans, but the paint has started to flake off it so I’ve given up on egg cups altogether now. I just run the eggs under cold water to stop them cooking when I take them out of the pan and then just top them as I’m ready to eat them and hold them in one hand and ‘soldier’ with the other.
I think that serama and Dutch bantams are a very similar size as are seabrights too. I really wanted Dutch bantams or seabrights but couldn’t find any breeders near enough to me. I just love small sized bantams. I had never though about just holding the egg without a cup. This is so interesting to find out what other people do with their small sized eggs.