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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 perc

• agumonkey 4y ago
  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".
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    • BenjiWiebe 4y ago
      What about canned soda? If drinking from a can it's pretty hard to see what color the soda is, without making a point of checking. I wonder if the can color is then the signal?
      • 0ldskool 4y ago
        color is probably associated with certain flavors. For most people our eyesight is used to identify things more so then other senses. If you don't see the color you probably have to work slightly harder to identify what is being eaten. How many people have a tongue so accurate they can eat/drink food blindfolded and identify it?
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    The same thing is true about red and white wine. Color it all red and no one can tell the difference.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • scoot 4y ago
      I'm sorry, but that just isn't true. No doubt some wines cross over, but the tannins present in much red wine are notable by their absence from pretty much all white wine.
      • fullstop 4y ago
        Yes, this. Red and white don't taste that similar to me. My nose isn't great, especially compared to my wife's, but I could tell you 100% of the time if I was tasting red or white while blindfolded.
        • aembleton 4y ago
          Would you be able to tell if you weren't blindfolded and it was white wine that had food colouring added to it so that it appeared as red? Would your sense of taste overpower what your eyes were telling you?
          • fullstop 4y ago
            I absolutely could do this, even with food coloring.
            • haimez 4y ago
              Please report back after confirming :)
              • fullstop 4y ago
  • powersnail 4y ago
    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.
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      I'm skeptical. Coca Cola and Pepsi have fairly distinct flavor profiles. There are some that I could see being more problematic. Like RC vs Pepsi, which have a similar profile. But Sprite? Nah, that's got a strong citrus component that definitely doesn't exist in a cola.
      • powersnail 4y ago
        Oh, they are probably indeed different. But the question wasn’t whether they were different; it was whether we could tell the difference in a blind folded test. 62 students, 50% error rate.
      • tristor 4y ago
        > But Sprite? Nah, that's got a strong citrus component that definitely doesn't exist in a cola. It may surprise you to find out, then, that Coca-Cola is actually a lemon-lime soda. In fact, all Colas are predominantly citrus flavored. "The primary modern flavoring ingredients in a cola drink are citrus oils (from orange, lime, and lemon peels), cinnamon, vanilla, and an acidic flavorant." [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola
    • gamblor956 4y ago
      Coke and Pepsi do not taste the same, and Sprite does not taste like either of them. It's not simply a matter of different amounts of sugar, they use different "natural flavors" and have different levels of carbonation. The difference in flavors is roughly similar to the difference between an IPA, a double IPA, and a cider.
      • powersnail 4y ago
  • nanidin 4y ago
    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.
• dzhiurgis 4y ago
  But is that because of their past experience i.e. buying premium eggs vs cheap eggs before trained them into a bias?
  • simsla 4y ago
    It's not just colour acting as an equaliser, but people being unable to distinguish when you take yolk colour out of the equation entirely. From the linked thread: > "blindfolded tasters couldn’t really tell the difference between fresh pastures backyard eggs and 2-week old supermarket eggs"
    • px43 4y ago
      Who were the participants? Random people off the street, or professional tasters who actually pay attention to what they're eating?
      • upsidesinclude 4y ago
        Hard to believe that discerning people exist! It's the same as the claims that no one knows they are sick for weeks before symptoms. If you're unhealthy and living with that, yeah, I guess you might not notice feeling off
        • rootusrootus 4y ago
          > no one knows they are sick for weeks before symptoms Weeks? Regular colds and flu have incubation periods of just a few days. Diseases with incubation periods measured in weeks tend to be the more serious ones that don't occur often enough (thankfully) to be used as a good comparison point.
• wirthjason 4y ago
  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. http://barbstuckey.com/the-shop/ http://barbstuckey.com/the-shop/
  • AussieWog93 4y ago
    >one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cram, Ben Chohen, doesn’t have a sense of taste. That explains so much!
• taneq 4y ago
  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.
  • jjeaff 4y ago
    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.
    • pegasus 4y ago
      I think he's talking about wine-lovers - not the vast majority of people by a large margin.
      • taneq 4y ago
        Even wine-likers would be able to tell, but the vast majority of people don't know much about any given niche, by definition. It's like saying "80% of people surveyed couldn't tell the difference between an AE86 and an AE85 just by driving them". Duh but the difference is there and not hard to spot if you know what you're looking for. We need to stop conflating general unfamiliarity with impossibility to distinguish.
      • jjeaff 4y ago
        The blind taste tests I have seen were of self proclaimed wine lovers.
  • robocat 4y ago
    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.
• Mikeb85 4y ago
  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.
  • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    It's almost as if you did not read the article, especially the last two sentences.
    • Mikeb85 4y ago
      Almost like I was responding to a comment, not the article itself... That's why there's levels to comments.
• kuhewa 4y ago
  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
• yibg 4y ago
  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.
  • webmobdev 4y ago
    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 https://simpleindianrecipes.com/Home/Fried-Egg.aspx ).
    • yibg 4y ago
      Incidentally, that pictures actually shows another difference I noticed between these and "store bought" eggs. The store bought eggs the egg white when fried tend to get bubbly, where as the "golden yolk" eggs they tend to stay smooth. I prefer smooth, as the bubbly white gives a weird texture. EDIT: I don't mean bubbly as in fried crispy kind of bubbly, but just air filled but not crispy kind.
  • Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > 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. 0: https://vjppoultry.com/2018/03/25/egg-color-and-colored-earlobes-in-chickens/ https://vjppoultry.com/2018/03/25/egg-color-and-colored-earl...