J. Kenji López-Alt has a bit in his Food Lab book where he explores the effect of yolk colour on taste. Paraphrasing, the takeaway is that people generally perceive redder/deeper yolks as more flavoursome, but if you remove this factor (with food colouring, say), then people can't tell the difference. He summarises this in a twitter thread: [1]
Some french tv channel did a quick game test, asking a bunch of students to sip colored soda and guess the flavour. Green was mint, Red was strawberry, Yellow was citrus, they were all strawberry. Surprising "reality".
I’ve always wondered if part of the reason the “clear” craze for sodas died off is that you didn’t have the right signals to tell you what it tastes like.
A food scientist came to my high school and did a similar demonstration with us - except with different flavors of koolaid. Students reported red as cherry, purple as grape ... but they were actually the same flavor and only differed in color.
We did an experiment in class, where we drank sodas blindfolded. Not only did we fail to distinguish Coke Cola and Pepsi, we couldn't even tell sprite from coke!
I would have never believed that they taste so incredibly similar without the experiment.
For people into this kind of stuff check out “Taste: What You’re Missing” from food scientist Barb Stucky.
It’s a pop science collection of stores about measuring tastes and food pleasure. I remember reading a chapter on texture and how one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cram, Ben Chohen, doesn’t have a sense of taste. When you can’t taste anything food, ice cream in particular, becomes very boring after the first couple bites. So the sense of pleasure comes from different textures rather than different flavors. That’s why B&J’s ice cream has so many chunky ingredients.
Over here in the bay area some Japanese markets have "golden yolk" brand eggs that have deep orange colored yolks. I don't know if they're more nutritious / taste better but the texture is different. When frying these and regular store bought eggs in the same pan, they hold their shape better. The store bought eggs spreads out more and the egg white tears more easily.
> Over here in the bay area some Japanese markets have "golden yolk" brand eggs that have deep orange colored yolks. I don't know if they're more nutritious / taste better but the texture is different. When frying these and regular store bought eggs in the same pan, they hold their shape better. The store bought eggs spreads out more and the egg white tears more easily.
Your issues sound more like age than quality; I worked on small hobby farms with 10 hens and large scale farms with 1000s of laying hens and altered their feed to try and change the yolk colour. It's what you'd expect, actually, the more bugs and less processed food they ate (especially grass) the more gamey the eggs tasted. The more bread we fed them, with butters and additives, the lighter the yolks got.
We gave them kitchen scraps, and they visited the compost heaps for bugs and let them roam the gardens as a form of pest control; during the spring/summer they were learning to hunt down field mice and grasshoppers and the yolks got blood red as a result of this increase in protein. The egg shells were determined by breed, and quite consistently the same color as their ear areas [0].
Store bough eggs could be weeks old before they arrive to your kitchen, and even longer since most won't eat them right away, too.
In short, chicken breeds and their respective diets will be the main determinant of egg color and yolk respectively.
They are also pretty mean when in large groups to other hens, the term 'pecking order' is real in nature and more-so with hens who will bully an often feebler hen in order to establish dominance within the pack. Having a rooster sort of calms them down, but not in terms of hierarchy as they are hard-wired to asset dominance within their group. These things really do behave like little raptors, which is why I ate like a dozen eggs a day when I farmed. They ware also cannibals who will eat their own eggs for no apparent reason--they were all well fed and had plenty of other options for food.
Ah, yes, that would be something I would be excited about in an egg - egg yolks that don't break easily. Many in my family love their eggs fried as "bulls eye" / "sunny side up" ( https://simpleindianrecipes.com/Home/Fried-Egg.aspx ).
I mean, you can definitely tell the difference between, say, a mass-produced egg and one from a naturally raised chicken. The latter often has more orange-y yolks. That being said, some large-scale producers add stuff to the diet to get more orange yolks and some naturally raised eggs aren't super orange so yes, colour alone doesn't mean much.
There's a legitimate reason what one might hold that impression, although I'm not sure to what degree it is at play. A home grown chook that gets a lot of its diet from foraging insects and eating various scraps probably will have a more flavorful, eggier egg and due to the carotenes in the diet the yolk will be redder.
Of course, you can get the same orange yolk from adding caroteens to the feed of an industrially grown layer's feed with none of the associated other differences
Reminds me of the studies which show that wine connoisseurs are describing the colour, not the taste, of the wine. I've always found this highly suspect because I guarantee anyone who drinks wine regularly could fairly accurately judge what price bracket a wine came from, at least within a factor of 2-3. You could mistake a $10 wine for a $15 wine or vice versa but a $50 wine is noticeably different.
That is not in line with the blind taste tests I have seen. The vast majority of people not only can't pick out the more expensive wine, they also tend to prefer the cheaper wines.
I suggest you organise this with your friends - it is a lot of fun and you can enjoy an adult science experiment.
If you do want to try it, then two suggestions: 1. try to have some way to blind yourself from the results, 2. Make a decision whether you want everyone to get plastered or not.
I did this a few years ago and it was heaps of fun, but I wasn’t careful about amounts so we all got trolleyed by mistake.
I got five chickens last year and now have more eggs then I know what to do with (so we give a lot away). Everyone that has them says they are so much better and I have wondered if that is just due to them being able to see the chickens and their home. It is near impossible to hard boil the eggs they lay because the “membrane” (layer between the shell and egg-stuff) is so thick. The yolk is a darker yellow as well. I feed them mid-priced crumbles from tractor supply and give them scraps maybe once per week.
We have backyard chickens and hard-boil a lot of eggs. The biggest effect on peel-ability: Start with boiling water, do not start the eggs in cold water.
For years I started with cold water because that's what Alton Brown said to do in Good Eats. And for years the eggs were a pain to peel. When I read Kenji's article, I switched, and immediately eggs became much easier to peel. Night and day.
No other factor comes close in terms of effect. Not age, not backyard vs store bought. Not the breed (at least, not for any of the dozen chicken breeds we have had). Start with boiling water and 9/10 eggs peel nicely, start with cold water and 9/10 eggs peel terribly.
I steam them to get consistent hot exterior temps. Plus it is easier to rinse them when they are in a steamer basket. And it uses less water. And the water is faster to boil.
I'm not sure how accurate this is, but I was told decades ago that starting with cold water was mostly based wanting to avoid scalded hands when placing the eggs into water or to avoid cracked shells from impact of the raw eggs with the pot or with each other.
This is interesting to me because pressure cooker eggs start cold but after a few dozen batches, fresh eggs or old, I’ve never had a batch that was hard to peel. I do ice bath them though.
Do a blind taste test with store bought and home grown eggs. You will be able to tell. After years of eating home grown eggs, I nearly spit out store eggs when I had them. The texture and flavor is so bad it was an immediate involuntary response. Home eggs are velvety and rich in flavor. Store eggs tasted like bland rubber. I say the difference is as stark as comparing scrambled store eggs and reconstituted powdered eggs.
My wife claimed there was no difference for a very long time. She had the same experience when we needed to buy store eggs last winter.
Strangely, when going from store eggs to home eggs the difference isn't as pronounced.
I have been raising pastured free range egg chicks for years. If I don't see the color of the yolk, I can't tell the difference between mine and store bought.
Oddly enough, others can and cooks say the whites are much easier to whip.
Research says that the nutritional value is not significantly different between organic and backyard.
However, I expect the fact the backyard eggs are fresh laid is the big differentiator. The supply chain between farm and supermarket is huge, whilst backyard eggs can be laid that day.
In the US farmers have 28 days to get eggs in cartons.
Once in cartoons eggs must be sold in 30 days. Store eggs can be quite old. Freshness is likely a big part of flavor. I suspect that the US egg washing method may affect flavor as well. Home eggs typically aren't washed and are only a few days old. The eggs I sell were laid that week.
My friend had some eggs from his chickens in his backyard and I was surprised I didn’t like them as much as the Happy Egg Co. Heritage Breed eggs I buy at Sprouts. The eggs are $8 a dozen and the only eggs I’ll eat now. Everything else tastes off. Maybe the flavor is from the breed of chicken? The eggs are brown and blue.
They definitely have the same hard boiling issue with a strong membrane.
I want it to be placebo as these eggs are expensive and I spend a few hundred a month on them. But I’ve bought every expensive brand of egg I can (Vital Farms, among others, which _used_ to taste amazing then became popular maybe and tasted like any other egg?) and _only_ this brand tastes different than a bog standard cheap egg.
The same thing happened with Kerrygold butter. Regular cheap butter tastes like I’m eating Crisco now.
Dude get some chickens. My cost per dozen is around $3 at current feed prices and 60% laying rate. If you feed them your kitchen scraps the feed cost is even lower.
The eggs you get that dont peel well are fresh. Less than 2 weeks old. Home grown eggs are the same way until they age and dry out a bit.
This is very true. Years ago we had chickens, and fresh eggs (laid over the past couple of days) were impossible to peel the shell from after hard boiling.
We started soft boiling, knocking the head off and using a small spoon to eat. It was either that or fried/scrambled.
I never did find out how long a fresh egg would have to age in order to become peelable when hard boiled.
I recently started using a pressure cooker (instant pot brand) to make hard cooked eggs. I use a 4 minute cooking time, instant release the pressure, then plunge the eggs right away into cold water to stop their cooking.
+1 to pressure cooker for a few mins + cold water bath. I tried all the tricks normally stated for hard boiling eggs, and always had half the eggs just refusing to come out of their shell. 100% of the time with my instant pot they just slip out of the shell.
I poach eggs for breakfast in my InstantPot. 3 eggs for 5 minutes on steam. I've found that eggs with orange yolks tend towards a jammy texture, but yellow yolks tend towards a drier texture.
If you're at all interested in storing eggs long term, look up "water glassing". It needs to be done with freshly laid eggs, but the eggs are still edible months later.
We keep ours in a skelter and I boil a dozen of so when it starts to overflow. This has been my experience as well.
I have 17 chickens, 16 of them are hens. I get 9-12 a day and my neighbors love me because we don't eat them. The yolks are big and deep orange/yellow and people seem to love them. I have y purchased an egg in a few years so I have no frame of reference any more. They're free range and they eat everything they can find (snakes, frogs, lizards, bugs, plants) and all the feed and scratch I feed them.
I think that, separate from any objective difference in "quality" of the eggs, seeing happy chickens is a perfectly fine reason to derive more enjoyment from consuming the eggs in question.
I finally found a full proof way of making any egg easy to peel. I wonder if it would work with eggs like these. I pressure steam then in an instant pot for about three minutes.
> near impossible to hard boil the eggs they lay because the “membrane”
I am curious about this. Is it maybe your boiling technique that is causing this hard membrane? Proteins toughen up if exposed to too much heat.
I get my eggs up to room temperature and drop them into boiling water for 6.5 minutes at sea level. Then I remove the hot water immediately and let them cool. These eggs (no matter where they come from) are always easy to peel and never too tough.
A brand in the UK called Clarence Court started producing a range of eggs (maybe a decade ago?) that have an intensely orange yolk [1] and this became a real differentiator, in some ways an indicator of quality. I know when an egg is Clarence Court in a restaurant for instance (and have confirmed numerous times). They are also delicious eating.
The effect is so profound that supermarket own brands have now also started producing similarly richly-orange-yolked eggs.
I noticed the supermarkets producing copycats and became suspicious of the method by which they achieved the colour. There's something qualitatively different about the darkened yolk in the Clarence Court eggs, and it makes me wonder about additives, I guess they're just adding caretinoids to the feed.
Yes! I completely agree. The yolks of Clarence Court-alikes just don’t feel as “rich”, whatever that means, and I can readily tell the difference when having yolk-heavy food like egg soldiers, for example.
In the US there is a brand called Happy Egg with a dark orange yolk. They are my preferred brand now, because who wants to buy unhappy eggs? They are the only one I can find with dark orange yolk.
Happy Egg Co. eggs are my favorite! So much so that I emailed them during the early pandemic thanking them for making such amazing eggs.
Have you tried the Heritage breed and their other lines of eggs? I’ve found the cheaper eggs have the same dark orange yolk but the flavor of the Heritage breed eggs is absolutely divine. It’s ruined other eggs for me.
Interestingly Vital Farms used to have eggs that tasted great but perhaps as they got more popular and sourced eggs from more places, their eggs quality dropped and I stopped buying them.
Happy egg are my favorite as well. I have to say though, I tried their organic line and the yolks are indeed not as orange and a bit more runny. I actually buy the standard line for this reason
Why do all the images in this article have wrong/fake EXIF?
(Well, not all; it looks like that they copied the EXIF of the first image (which has the matching EXIF Image description of "Egg yolk in wooden spoon on eggs. Close up.", together with all the other camera/lens info) to all the other images for some reason. Nothing serious, but weird practice nevertheless.)
My guess is the intern who saved the photos wanted to make them the same dimensions copy and pasted all subsequent photos onto/from the first photo exporting from that; that's why the captions are the same for the rest of the photos.
Edit: and also notice the file names as in-article-eggyolks#.jpg which confirms my theory somebody saving over the original photo.
I’m curious to learn how you ran across this. A browser extension that surfaces the data? Or do you regularly go around downloading and inspecting images as you read?
While we’re at it, can we also talk about the use of glyphosate aka RoundUp in our farms? It’s routinely used before and after a harvest in order to accelerate desiccation and allow the farmers to have multiple yields in a single season. Dyeing egg yolks and dying organs from RoundUp what have we become.
I'm a sucker for premium orange yolk eggs. My partner is sucker for buying eggs from a guy who grows them in his backyard.
Sometimes, especially when making creamy scrambled eggs I can almost taste fishy or shellfish flavour (not something I like). We are based in NZ and I've heard people use sea shells as a source of calcium for hens, but I find hard to believe that it could be it.
This will happen if you feed your chickens salmon or other fish. I have chickens and yes I occasionally my sons or wife will feed them left overs and it may be some salmon skin we did not eat, some fish bones and heads that we did not eat, etc. When we do this the eggs take on that taste. I don't like it either and if it does happen then I feed those eggs to the dog....
You should give them back to the hens. They prefer them fresh but they'll eat them cooked too. Producing an egg takes a lot of nutrients. They'll any that crack, to help replenish. They'll eventually eat the shells too, which helps with their digestion.
The "fishy" taste is likely indicative of a higher omega 3 content, you get the same taste from 100% grass fed and finished beef and buffalo due to the higher omega 3 content.
Omega-3 doesn't taste like fish unless it's literally fish oil, which is often an additive to improve the 3-6 ratio of foods. Flax seed doesn't taste like fish...
Grass fed beef tasting "fishy"? I've never experienced that and can't imagine how it would work.
I am not sure this is true. I live in a country (NZ) where most cattle are grass fed their entire lives. This is supposed to mean higher omega 3 content but I have never tasted a fishy taste. Not even once.
If grass fed and fishy taste are corrolated, I suspect there is another cause. Maybe organic fish containing grass fertiliser?
We just started smelling/tasting some fishy flavor with eggs from one of our hens. We suspected flaxseed in the feed we were giving, and switching feeds seems to have fixed it.
Brown egg layers are apparently more prone to this issue
I have a few ex-battery hens and what I now view as a good egg is one you can crack into a pan of boiling water and it holds together, giving you a perfect poached egg in a couple of minutes. Store bought eggs tend to fall apart in water.
Not fresh is an understatement in many parts of the world. In the U.K., it’s up to 60 days - and in the U.S., it’s common for eggs in grocery stores to have been laid 6 months previously.
As a kid I raised chickens and in the morning I could wait in the coop for an egg to drop. This egg always stood up in the pan. All fresh eggs stand up. The whites in store-bought eggs tend to be watery and spread out quickly, indicating that they've been sitting outside the chicken for an extended period.
Readit News
[1]: https://nitter.net/kenjilopezalt/status/1176542696724320256
I would have never believed that they taste so incredibly similar without the experiment.
It’s a pop science collection of stores about measuring tastes and food pleasure. I remember reading a chapter on texture and how one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cram, Ben Chohen, doesn’t have a sense of taste. When you can’t taste anything food, ice cream in particular, becomes very boring after the first couple bites. So the sense of pleasure comes from different textures rather than different flavors. That’s why B&J’s ice cream has so many chunky ingredients.
http://barbstuckey.com/the-shop/
That explains so much!
Your issues sound more like age than quality; I worked on small hobby farms with 10 hens and large scale farms with 1000s of laying hens and altered their feed to try and change the yolk colour. It's what you'd expect, actually, the more bugs and less processed food they ate (especially grass) the more gamey the eggs tasted. The more bread we fed them, with butters and additives, the lighter the yolks got.
We gave them kitchen scraps, and they visited the compost heaps for bugs and let them roam the gardens as a form of pest control; during the spring/summer they were learning to hunt down field mice and grasshoppers and the yolks got blood red as a result of this increase in protein. The egg shells were determined by breed, and quite consistently the same color as their ear areas [0].
Store bough eggs could be weeks old before they arrive to your kitchen, and even longer since most won't eat them right away, too.
In short, chicken breeds and their respective diets will be the main determinant of egg color and yolk respectively.
They are also pretty mean when in large groups to other hens, the term 'pecking order' is real in nature and more-so with hens who will bully an often feebler hen in order to establish dominance within the pack. Having a rooster sort of calms them down, but not in terms of hierarchy as they are hard-wired to asset dominance within their group. These things really do behave like little raptors, which is why I ate like a dozen eggs a day when I farmed. They ware also cannibals who will eat their own eggs for no apparent reason--they were all well fed and had plenty of other options for food.
0: https://vjppoultry.com/2018/03/25/egg-color-and-colored-earl...
From the linked thread:
> "blindfolded tasters couldn’t really tell the difference between fresh pastures backyard eggs and 2-week old supermarket eggs"
Of course, you can get the same orange yolk from adding caroteens to the feed of an industrially grown layer's feed with none of the associated other differences
If you do want to try it, then two suggestions: 1. try to have some way to blind yourself from the results, 2. Make a decision whether you want everyone to get plastered or not.
I did this a few years ago and it was heaps of fun, but I wasn’t careful about amounts so we all got trolleyed by mistake.
We have backyard chickens and hard-boil a lot of eggs. The biggest effect on peel-ability: Start with boiling water, do not start the eggs in cold water.
For years I started with cold water because that's what Alton Brown said to do in Good Eats. And for years the eggs were a pain to peel. When I read Kenji's article, I switched, and immediately eggs became much easier to peel. Night and day.
No other factor comes close in terms of effect. Not age, not backyard vs store bought. Not the breed (at least, not for any of the dozen chicken breeds we have had). Start with boiling water and 9/10 eggs peel nicely, start with cold water and 9/10 eggs peel terribly.
And it was the Internet that just now added more votes for pre-boil and peel-ability.
Cool Internet, Cool.
Totally agree with you on this though.
Deleted Comment
My wife claimed there was no difference for a very long time. She had the same experience when we needed to buy store eggs last winter.
Strangely, when going from store eggs to home eggs the difference isn't as pronounced.
Oddly enough, others can and cooks say the whites are much easier to whip.
Research says that the nutritional value is not significantly different between organic and backyard.
However, I expect the fact the backyard eggs are fresh laid is the big differentiator. The supply chain between farm and supermarket is huge, whilst backyard eggs can be laid that day.
They definitely have the same hard boiling issue with a strong membrane.
I want it to be placebo as these eggs are expensive and I spend a few hundred a month on them. But I’ve bought every expensive brand of egg I can (Vital Farms, among others, which _used_ to taste amazing then became popular maybe and tasted like any other egg?) and _only_ this brand tastes different than a bog standard cheap egg.
The same thing happened with Kerrygold butter. Regular cheap butter tastes like I’m eating Crisco now.
The eggs you get that dont peel well are fresh. Less than 2 weeks old. Home grown eggs are the same way until they age and dry out a bit.
You eat over 300 eggs a month?
We started soft boiling, knocking the head off and using a small spoon to eat. It was either that or fried/scrambled.
I never did find out how long a fresh egg would have to age in order to become peelable when hard boiled.
So long as the yolks are waxy, little mess. And it's fast and sweet.
Even fresh eggs peel perfectly.
I have 17 chickens, 16 of them are hens. I get 9-12 a day and my neighbors love me because we don't eat them. The yolks are big and deep orange/yellow and people seem to love them. I have y purchased an egg in a few years so I have no frame of reference any more. They're free range and they eat everything they can find (snakes, frogs, lizards, bugs, plants) and all the feed and scratch I feed them.
I am curious about this. Is it maybe your boiling technique that is causing this hard membrane? Proteins toughen up if exposed to too much heat.
I get my eggs up to room temperature and drop them into boiling water for 6.5 minutes at sea level. Then I remove the hot water immediately and let them cool. These eggs (no matter where they come from) are always easy to peel and never too tough.
The effect is so profound that supermarket own brands have now also started producing similarly richly-orange-yolked eggs.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAe_TN_WsAAyQ9-.jpg:large
Have you tried the Heritage breed and their other lines of eggs? I’ve found the cheaper eggs have the same dark orange yolk but the flavor of the Heritage breed eggs is absolutely divine. It’s ruined other eggs for me.
Interestingly Vital Farms used to have eggs that tasted great but perhaps as they got more popular and sourced eggs from more places, their eggs quality dropped and I stopped buying them.
(Well, not all; it looks like that they copied the EXIF of the first image (which has the matching EXIF Image description of "Egg yolk in wooden spoon on eggs. Close up.", together with all the other camera/lens info) to all the other images for some reason. Nothing serious, but weird practice nevertheless.)
Edit: and also notice the file names as in-article-eggyolks#.jpg which confirms my theory somebody saving over the original photo.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/exif-quickview/kji... (there are lots more advanced ones on Chrome store / AMO, but this works for me.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjrxXC3kGf4
"The #1 Egg consumer is Japan. Here's why. ($70 vs $1 Egg)"
[1] https://investigatemidwest.org/2019/05/26/controversial-pest...
[2] https://www.cornucopia.org/2017/10/glyphosate-use-desiccant-...
Sometimes, especially when making creamy scrambled eggs I can almost taste fishy or shellfish flavour (not something I like). We are based in NZ and I've heard people use sea shells as a source of calcium for hens, but I find hard to believe that it could be it.
Grass fed beef tasting "fishy"? I've never experienced that and can't imagine how it would work.
I am not sure this is true. I live in a country (NZ) where most cattle are grass fed their entire lives. This is supposed to mean higher omega 3 content but I have never tasted a fishy taste. Not even once.
If grass fed and fishy taste are corrolated, I suspect there is another cause. Maybe organic fish containing grass fertiliser?
Brown egg layers are apparently more prone to this issue
I don't know that backyard eggs would have more of it but the slight fishy taste in eggs is (and liver) is due to it.
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