9 ms·

I listened to an NPR Splendid Table segment [1] where they say that, in a blind taste test, nobody can really differentiate between the taste of farm-fresh eggs

• jules 14y ago
  The taste of supermarket eggs and the eggs of my parents' hens is easily distinguished if you eat the eggs the same day or within a couple of days that they were laid. Older eggs have a stronger flavour. The structure is also different. The egg whites of boiled fresh eggs are more firm and crumbly while the egg whites of boiled old eggs are more jelly. When uncooked, old eggs are more liquid and fall apart, while fresh eggs hold together (if you fry a fresh egg in a pan it is generally smaller but thicker, and if you poach a fresh egg it stays together egg instead of becoming a spaghetti). The white of cooked fresh eggs is a little more opaque, and the yellow is generally a little lighter than of supermarket eggs. Fresh eggs are much harder to peel than old eggs because the white sticks to the shell much more. As home-laid eggs age, they become pretty much identical to supermarket eggs, though there are still some differences: they are not as perfectly identical as supermarket eggs (their sizes, colors and shell thickness vary), and they have a small black dot which is the embryo (which some people don't like -- you can prevent it by only having female chickens like most egg plants).
• elptacek 14y ago
  Yes. Very much so. A couple of summers ago, we found a woman local to our vacation spot in MI who raises chickens very much the same way my mom raised ours. As corny as it sounds, the first bite nearly brought tears to my eyes, they were so good. Really did taste just like childhood to me. My guess is that "nobody" in the blind taste test had that experience.
  • gcp 14y ago
    My guess is that a sighted test can always distinguish things that a blind one cannot.
• gambiting 14y ago
  I find the free range eggs tasting marginally better than the cheapest Tesco/Asda/Morrisons Value eggs. They have a nicer colour of the yolks and a tiny bit more flavour. But if you ask me, it's definitely not worth a 4x increase in price.
  • tptacek 14y ago
    I don't know what a free range egg is. Is that a designation for premium eggs at the market, or your way of saying "eggs we sourced directly from a farm"? [Following up: the answer appears to be "it's a designation for premium eggs at the supermarket".]
    • jimwhitson 14y ago
      In the UK, 'free-range' is a legal designation, as opposed to battery-farmed. To call eggs or poultry free-range, certain standards must be met - not very high standards, but enough to exclude stacked-cage-based methods. We also have various other marks defined by other bodies: some companies (e.g. Marks & Spencer, a supermarket chain) define an in-house standard, some are defined by charities (e.g. the RSPCA, a bird conservancy), and so on. I suppose similar things exist in the US?
      • philhippus 14y ago
        *RSPB
        • jimwhitson 14y ago
          Quite right, thank you.
    • Trobee 14y ago
      It depends on the country but in the UK it basically means the chickens are not caged and have access to an outside area and it puts a limit on how many birds you can have per square metre
    • 14y ago
• tptacek 14y ago
  I doubt it's malarky. If you're not an egg person, the difference is probably subtle. There is an obvious difference in freshness between supermarket eggs and farm eggs. Egg freshness is uncontroversial; as they age, the membrane around the yolk breaks down and the whites thin. Supermarket eggs are usually around 2 weeks old. There is an obvious difference in color between supermarket and farm eggs; farm eggs have orange yolks and supermarket eggs have yellow yolks. This does make it hard to blind an egg taste test, though. The color difference comes from the feed of the chicken. Apart from cooking up better, farm eggs taste richer to me, and don't have "off" flavors (a small number of supermarket egg chickens get feed that includes fish meal).
  • ars 14y ago
    How do you peel such fresh eggs? I've found that with fresh eggs the shell sticks and is almost impossible to remove without shredding the egg.
    • jules 14y ago
      I don't know any method to peel fresh eggs without shredding them. If you can avoid it, don't peel. Cut the egg in two and empty it with a spoon.
    • elptacek 14y ago
      Put a teaspoon of baking soda in the water when you cook them. Also, the less pointy part of the egg will have a small bubble in the bottom (the fresher the egg, the smaller the bubble). Tap the rounded edge first, gently, and you should have a small space that you can get a finger into. ETA: try to grab the shell and the inner membrane together.
      • riffraff 14y ago
        I heard the bit about baking soda in the water before, could you explain why it helps detaching the shell from the egg?
        • 14y ago
• wiredfool 14y ago
  You can tell with poached eggs. The texture is very different, the fresh eggs hold together, and the older ones tend to waft around and not be nearly as good.
• pixl97 14y ago
  I'm sure most the taste is determined by the feed, which is mostly a common ground up mixture. 'Yard eggs', where the chicken doesn't not eat a diet of %100 feed can have a different taste and yolk color.
• araneae 14y ago
  My neighbor has 5 hens- he gave us eggs when we first moved in. I ate them, but honestly I could not get over the visible smears of poo on them. So for me, they tasted icky, but I'm sure it was entirely psychological.
  • tptacek 14y ago
    Ever see the inside of a battery hen house? :|
• antidaily 14y ago
  I buy eggs from my farmers market and they do taste better. The yolk color is more vibrant as well. I eat a lot of eggs so I buy from the supermarket often; they're fine but not the same.
• fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  I keep hens, and usually can't tell the difference in flavor between store-bought and home-produced. Occasionally the store-bought ones have a stronger sulphur odor, but even that is rare. Others claim they can tell the difference. YMMV