Do brown eggs taste any different than white eggs?

By all rights I should be talking about the history of baked Alaska, but all this egg talk is just too darn fun. That’s an outstanding question, reader Nick. And believe it or not there is some data out there on this. Turns out that in blind taste tests, consumers can’t tell the difference between white eggs and brown eggs, which many chefs and TV personalities swear are superior. Here in Kentucky we get a lot of green-shelled eggs (which thrill my Dr. Suess-loving daughters). The study didn’t specifically mention them, but my guess is that a blind taster wouldn’t be able to tell any difference there, either.

And would you believe that blind tasters also can’t tell the difference between fresh and old (refrigerated) eggs? Especially when they’re scrambled or fried, the vast majority of people can’t taste the difference between month-old refrigerated eggs and eggs that are fresh from the chicken.

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Do egg farmers still use nest eggs?

Yes in fact they do, reader Sarah. Really big egg operations don’t, but smaller ones still employ them. My buddy John who runs a small chicken ranch/egg farm was the one who first told me about nest eggs. He said he could never afford to buy the ceramic ones, but as luck would have it […]

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On Nest Eggs

Chicken feed, scratch, nest eggs. Why is there so much chicken-related money slang? I haven’t a clue. But then I guess there are quite a few garden-related money words: beans, lettuce, cabbage. I tend to favor bread and dough myself. But then I digress…no surprises there.

Most of us foodie types are at least peripherally aware of the rise in chicken-keeping as a hobby. I’ve noticed several small coops in my neighborhood here in the Louisville Highlands, and I often come across escapees running around in nearby parks. Indeed the missus and I nearly bought a house from a fellow who kept chickens and let them roam freely around his fenced-in yard, a big double lot. He normally kept six, but that particularly week had only five thanks to a hawk that had recently moved into the neighborhood (a small pile of feathers in the middle of the yard marked hen number six’s last known location).

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Chickens: Obsessive-Compulsives of the Bird World

My grandmother used to marvel at how little I grasped about the basic workings of a chicken. But then she was born in 1908 and grew up in a farm town in east-central Illinois. I spent my formative years in a Chicago suburb dropping quarters into video games. It gave me a totally different perspective on live poultry.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I encountered my first chicken farmer, and of course I had no end of questions for him. The information I picked up was fascinating. For instance, I had no idea that hens need not know the ways of a rooster to start producing eggs. So-called “blood spots” are not, as is popularly thought, tiny chicken embryos. They happen when a blood vessel breaks somewhere near the yolk as the egg is forming.

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Eggshell White

Just thought I’d head this question off at the pass: what about eggshell color? What determines that? The answer: the breed of the hen. Different types of chickens lay different color eggs. I know there are a lot of folks out the under the impression that a brown shell is somehow indicative of a “less processed” egg, but isn’t so. Brown eggs can come from a commercial egg farm just as easily as white ones (and many do).

Contrary to popular myth, chicken eggshells are never, ever bleached. The reason for this is quite simple: eggshells are porous. The most an egg processor will do to an eggshell is apply a thin layer of oil or wax to replace the natural mucous layer that comes off when the eggs are washed. The layer helps keep contaminants out and extends the egg’s life.

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Egg Yellow

That was quick! Reader Sue asks: why do some eggs have darker yolks than others, and does a deep yellow color mean the yolks are more nutritious?

As far as I know a deep yellow yolk isn’t necessarily more nutritious than a pale yellow yolk. However I do know what makes one yolk darker than another: the diet of the hen. Chickens are omnivorous scavengers, which means they’ll eat all different sorts of things…pretty much whatever they come across. Hens that “scratch” in the barnyard (or the suburban back yard, as the case may be) eat everything from grains and legumes to grasses, leaves, roots, insects, worms, mice…even the carcasses of dead animals.

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Next Up: Baked Alaska

I’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while now, I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for. Maybe a surplus of eggs, which I’ve certainly got this week thanks to a generous neighbor/reader by the name of Patrick. Between the ice cream, the génoise and the meringue I should have no trouble using […]

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Let them eat cake!

I don’t know about you, but whenever the topics of brioche and headlessness come up, I can’t help but think of Marie Antoinette. Few people know that when Marie Antoinette uttered the line above, what she really said was “Let them eat brioche” (“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”). Fewer people still know that she never even uttered those words at all. The line was falsely attributed to Marie later on in her life…just about the time she was beheaded, right at the height of the French Revolution.

The day she was supposed to have declared “let them eat cake”, on her marriage to the Dauphin Louis-Auguste, the world-class competitive eater and future King of France, the line had already been written down by Rousseau in his Confessions, attributed to some other princes of some other country. When were the Confessions published? Four years prior to Marie’s wedding, when she was 10 years old and still living in Vienna.

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