Moroccan Words of the Day - Bayd and Bayd Bildi
When I moved to Morocco nine years ago, I was taken aback by the number of household and kitchen tasks that weren't part of everyday life back in the States. Washing eggs was just one of them.
Now I know a dirty egg shouldn't be a benchmark for freshness, but I confess that it's become one. In Morocco, eggs are called bayd (pronounced "by-id"), and they often go directly from the hen house to open cartons, which get stacked and tied together for delivery. No refrigeration, and no tidying up to make things look more pristine than they are naturally. I've become so accustomed to Morocco's brown eggs (along with poop, straw and feathers that sometimes accompany them), that when I travel back to the States, white eggs in Styrofoam cartons look peculiar and somewhat fake to me.
The paler eggs shown in the photo are bayd bildi, which are organic eggs or eggs from free-range chickens. Moroccans consider them superior to the more common brown bayd, since bayd bildi tend to be better-tasting and more colorful when cooked.
But chicken eggs aren't the only eggs available in Morocco. You can also find pigeon eggs, quail eggs, duck eggs and ostrich eggs. The glossary listing for bayd gives their names, as well as the Moroccan Arabic terms to describe scrambled eggs, fried eggs and hard-boiled eggs.
Photo © Christine Benlafquih
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Comments
I was totally going to write about eggs this week too…pretty much the exact same thing. Now, I’ll just leave link to your post!
Subhan Allah! I am an egg FREAK. I am (or should be) the poster child for the egg industry.
I have never had a better tasting egg than what I’ve had in Egypt. Yes, they are kind of yucky to clean, but man they are so good!
(Except for that occasional egg that gets lost somewhere between the chicken’s behind and the vendor’s cart, then found a week later and sold to unsuspecting egg lovers. That’s disgusting.)
LOL…those rotten eggs are a nasty find indeed!
I have to say that out of the countless eggs we’ve purchased in nine years, only a handful have been rotten. I’ve noticed a higher likelihood of getting a rotten egg when purchasing the bayd bildi.
However, the times when bayd bildi are given to us by friends on rural properties, there’s never been a bad egg in the bunch.
There was a time when it seemed i was always getting rotten eggs and had to start cracking my eggs one by one into a bowl before i added them to cake ingredients otherwise everything was wasted .Thankfully hasn’t happened for quite some time although i have had quite a number of rotten bildi eggs recently .