Can You Eat a Peacock Egg?

Of course not!  Peacocks don't lay eggs.  They are males.  If I correctly phrase the question to, "Can you eat the egg of a peahen?" well, then the answer is, "Of course you can!"  Penelope the Peahen lays between 4 - 8 eggs each year and because we don't have a peacock, they are not fertile.  In prior years she would set on them and it was a little futile watching her dutifully sit on her eggs when none were going to hatch.

Penelope the Peahen

This year we decided to go ahead and pick up her eggs.  They are noticeably larger than our chickens' eggs.

Here is a comparison that shows Penelope's egg on the left and one of our hens' eggs on the right.

In a week's time, Penelope laid four eggs and we picked each of them up.  She laid them in the grass, just out on the ground.  In prior years she laid her eggs on top of the flat roof of the goat barn.

Four peahen eggs

So, back to our original question, Can you eat them?  Yes, according to what I've read, they taste no different than chicken eggs, but we're going to find out this morning for breakfast.  I cracked her four eggs into a glass container to scramble them along with one chicken egg to show a comparison in size of the yolks.  You can see that a peahen's yolk in much larger.  I found in cracking her eggs, that the eggshell was harder than that of a chicken egg and the underlying membrane was harder to break. The yolk seemed to comprise a bigger percentage of the egg as opposed to a chicken egg.

Four peahen eggs and one chicken egg

Tricia sauteed some mushrooms, peppers and onions in a skillet.

And I scrambled the peahen eggs, adding some fresh ground pepper and kosher salt.

Scrambling up Penelope's eggs

When the vegetables were ready, we poured the peahen eggs in the skillet and cooked until done.

We were a little cautious at first in trying a new thing.  What would it taste like? Would it have a strong, wild taste?  We weren't sure, but we soon found out.  They were good!  We couldn't really distinguish a taste any different from our chicken's eggs.  We could get used to eating peahen eggs.  With the large size of them, it takes fewer of them to feed our family.  The only problem is that with Penelope only laying between 4-8 eggs a year, we'd best not count on Penelope to feed us.  We'll stick with chicken eggs.