Eggs from quails will make a great meal
Anne Gelling of River Grove Quail can provide you with eggs
It would take about nine quails’ eggs to make breakfast-for-one. And the shells are very hard so it could take a while. In fact, you can even get special scissors to chop the ends off the shells, they are so hard.
But why go to all that trouble when you can drop half a dozen in a pot of boiling water, cool them off two-anda-half minutes later, give the pot a shake to smash and remove the shells, rinse them and snack away on some of the most creamy, eggy, nourishing nibbles you’d ever want.
Because quails’ eggs were never intended for a main dish. They are more commonly used as an in a plethora of Asian dishes, as well as a tasty and nourishing protein snack.
Anne Gelling of River Grove Quail can provide the eggs and the recipes, from her lifestyle block just out of Waipawa.
While it’s still a hobby at this stage, Anne was getting about 80 of the tiny eggs a day at the height of laying season and is still gathering them by the handful each day, packing them up to sell at the Otane Farmers’ Market on Sundays or delivering them to customers in Napier and Hastings.
The small but intensive enterprise started two years ago when an ex dairyfarmer friend in the South Island told her he was starting a quail farm.
“I said ‘haha — good for you’ and thought nothing more of it,” Anne says.
“A few months later he said ‘this is going really well’ and four months after that he said he needed a North Island colleague.”
Anne — a veterinarian — had just purchased land in River Rd Waipawa “but I didn’t even have a house yet.”
She had, however, bought a few quail as she thought they’d be something nice to have on a lifestyle block.
“I was working fulltime but I thought if I wanted to dabble in quail farming I could employ some Woofers,” (Willing Workers on Organic Farms — usually international travellers, who work for food and accommodation).
“I hadn’t planned on Covid. No Woofers!”
While incubating eggs and rearing chicks in apple bins, Anne experimented building different types of pens to house the rather accidentprone birds.
“There were some heart-breaking failures as it was very hard to rat-proof the pens. But 18 months on we’ve got a successful design and 80 laying birds.”
Anne’s birds are Japanese quails. They are larger than Chinese quails and wider than Californian. They have been bred for many centuries as domestic birds — so much so that they are unable
to free range or look after themselves.
“They don’t brood their eggs, they’ve lost that ability so they have to be incubated. They hardly even lay them in the nest boxes . . . they can just be having a drink and decide to lay an egg right where they’re standing.
“Even drinking . . . the young birds have to be taught to drink. Left to their own devices they would drown. They are very cute but they have no brains.”
The Japanese quails are a meat and egg bird and Anne did have 50 processed for meat. “I had them in the freezer and a friend who is a French chef came to stay. My friend cooked some for a dinner party. They tasted fantastic, but I could only eat one bite. These were my babies, I had incubated them and taught them to eat and drink. I couldn’t eat them.”
While custom at the Otane Market was initially slow, once people tried
them they came back, Anne says.
“People are surprised at the flavour, it’s rich and creamy and the eggs don’t need salt. Children love them and they’re a great lunchbox snack. One customer pickles them, which I haven’t tried yet. You can cook them in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.
“The nutrition density in quail eggs is massive — much more than hens’ eggs. They are high in selenium and folic acid and they’re being used for a lot of phamaceutical purposes, especially in the asthma and allergy fields. The brown colour on the eggshells is pure copper. You can even wash it off and have white eggs.”
While finding the little birds labour intensive, Anne says they are also a labour of love. “They need to be kept clean, dry and safe and they aren’t the most clever — but they are certainly endearing.”