Devlin Brown at the water cooler: Boiled, scrambled or soaked, eggs should be part of your diet

Your recent column referencing your chickens was well-timed. I enjoy eggs, but I am so bored with them. Do you have any fresh ideas on how to prepare them?

I am an expert when it comes to chickens and eggs. Not the kind of expert you’d expect to find at an agricultural trade show, but enough to know that while chickens lay eggs, it was an egg that preceded the first chicken.

One day a bird that was not quite a chicken laid an egg. In that moment the final genetic mutation happened and the world’s first chicken hatched. The rest, they say, is history. That’s the evolutionary take.

The creationist take is probably something along the lines of: “And then there was a need for a complete protein, one that would be delicious and creamy, not have too many calories and enough dietary cholesterol to send people into a frenzy about just how many you are allowed to eat in a day without playing Russian roulette with your heart health. And so the hen was created and tasked with producing breakfast.”

Eggs are a complete protein because they contain all nine essential amino acids the body cannot produce on its own. They are highly digestible and protein is found in both the yolk and the white. They’re marvels of nature, yet by all indications my six hens make them effortlessly. Each masterpiece is followed by a proud egg song. That’s real, look it up. When you know your hens well enough and can recognise their voices it’s quite easy to hear the call and proclaim: “Ahh, Betty has just laid her egg.”

A large egg contains about 6g of protein, so, while they’re a good addition to your diet, you certainly can’t live on them alone. An egg is a great source of vitamins A, D and B12, as well as choline, a nutrient essential in a number of metabolic functions. It has about 75 calories, 5g of fat, zero carbohydrates, about 67mg of potassium, 70mg of sodium and 210mg of cholesterol.

In the modern-day Flavian Amphitheatre, the mainstream health fraternity battles the smaller low-carb-high-fat fraternity who just don’t believe that the cholesterol found in eggs is a problem. Here, dear reader, you have to pick a side.

According to an article on Mayo Clinic’s Health System, research shows that the dietary cholesterol in eggs “doesn’t seem to negatively affect the human body compared with other sources of cholesterol”.

The article references the fact that people tend to eat eggs with other foods that are high in saturated fat and cholesterol, such as bacon, cheese and butter. What came first? The cholesterol from eggs or the cholesterol from all the greasy stuff around them? Yet, many decades into the debate, people still warn me regularly to “go easy on the eggs to keep your cholesterol down”.

According to Mayo Clinic, most healthy people can eat up to seven eggs a week without affecting their heart health. Don’t quote me, but I suspect this is prudent advice: suggesting moderation. An excess of anything is bad for you.

They’re a fantastic addition to a well-balanced diet. I literally have them on tap and my neighbours, family and friends know to show up with empty egg cartons.

You can boil them, scramble them, fry them, poach them, turn them into quiches and bake with them (don’t do that too often). And then, when you’re bored and need a change, look to Asia or Mauritius.

There are variations of medium-boiled eggs soaked in various mixes of soy sauce until the white changes colour to a deep brown and the yolk becomes a syrup-like manna from heaven. The hard-boiled drier ones aren’t so great. Korean mayak eggs, or drug eggs, are my favourite.

Soy sauce, even when it says “reduced sodium”, is packed with sodium, and you do not want to overdose on that mineral, especially if you tend towards higher blood pressure.

Spring onion, chopped red chillies, diced brown onion, grated ginger, finely chopped fresh garlic, soy sauce, sesame seed oil, sesame seeds, fresh lemon juice and a cup of water. Soak the peeled medium-boiled eggs in the sauce in a sealed container overnight. Inexplicably delicious.

But be warned, though, this should be an occasional treat.