You can get unwashed eggs from farms in most parts of the US. Farm-fresh eggs are much better than supermarket eggs, regardless of whether they're washed.
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 versus supermarket. Do you find the experience (colors, community, etc?) of fresh eggs better?
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).
By cooling them off, of course? You boil your eggs for ~6min to get a nice runny yolk, then you take it off the stove, put it under the cold tap for a little while until all the water in the pot is cold, let it sit for a minute, perhaps pour in more cold water if it's gotten lukewarm, and voila, perfect eggs that are easy to peel.
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What? How can you people not know this? Oh wow, I love these little cultural snippets where you assume that everyone else knows some things you do, because you were taught them as a child. :-D
You have obviously never actually done this with eggs that are less than a week from laying... The pH of a fresh egg is closer to neutral and this causes the inner membrane to really stick to the shell, even after cooking. After the eggs have been washed and refrigerated for several days the pH edges closer to 9 and the egg is easier to peel (and the cooling trick works.)
Hardboiling works best on old eggs, when the membrane between shell and white has started to degrade.
Think of hardboiling eggs as a recipe for getting the most out of old food, much like making french toast with stale bread or fried rice with yesterday's steamed rice.
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.
It's likely that because you're cooking them in a basic (ph, acid vs base, etc) solution that the egg is being changed chemically. Using a harsher base might shed more light on that (though would possibly make it inedible).
You can try rolling the egg on a hard flat surface applying pressure. The shell cracks into small shards and I find it easier to peel without damaging the egg.
I get what you mean. Funnily enough, my reaction to an egg that doesn't have the dome in the white as well is that it's old and should be discarded. I'd probably fry it, but double-check it, and throw away the box if there were any eggs left in it. I don't think you can buy eggs that aren't really fresh in any supermarket here.
And from reading the article, I get the impression that weeks-old refrigerated eggs are the norm in the US. I had no idea. Yuck. :-)
(I know I'm wrong, refrigerated eggs last a long time, and they're perfectly fine, it's just not what I'm used to or were brought up to.)
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).
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.
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.
The taste difference might not be worth the price, but to my mind the difference in how the hens are treated more than makes up for it.
I think that both Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have done programs that have covered how poultry is farmed, but which ever one it was that I watched it definitely left me with the lasting belief that I don't want to eat eggs or chicken that isn't free range.
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".]
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.
A free range egg is an egg from a chicken that was allowed "free range" of a farm habitat for at least X hours each day (as opposed to being kept in a cage the entire time). A free range chicken usually, but not always, gets better feedstock and usually does not receive antibiotics or hormones.
Organic eggs are by definition free range eggs (in the US at least), but the reverse is not necessarily true.
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
I don't know if it's a EU norm but in France eggs are marked with a sequence starting with [0-3]FR, with 0 being the best quality i.e. free range eggs, and 3 meaning battery eggs.
Funnily enough, where I am, you can't buy eggs in a supermarket that aren't free-range or better. Demand for eggs from caged hens just dropped completely, and now you can't get them.
Are you in Europe? This isn't entirely a demand issue as such; the EU has introduced regulations (relating to cage size, treatment etc) which make battery farming of chickens a less attractive proposition for producers, especially for egg production. The production cost difference is now small enough that, given that there _is_ a bit more demand for free-range, it's not really worth it, at least for eggs to be sold commercially.
Or more likely, all farmers increased the size of the cages or connected them with the outside so they can now class them as free range, even though the conditions have not improved that much?
No,it's not. "Outside" could mean an equally small space,just outside of building. Sure,it's better,but it's no where near the real "free range" where chickens are just free to go wherever they like. It's more about space that they get rather than whatever they are outside or not.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And actual free range eggs from chickens who have been out to eat the grass and bugs are even better than 'free range' chickens who only get feed, not fresh bits.
Our chickens are sometimes in their run (which is roughly 5x bigger than the requirements to call it free range, but is mostly scratched to bare earth), and sometimes out in the yard. When they've been in the yard for a few days, the yolks get a much deeper golden color.
Small farms probably aren't deliberately pumping beta carotene into their hens, and battery farms don't fortify their feed to change yolk color. Strikes me as similar to the situation with factory tomatoes, which are gassed to appear ripe.
Sure they do. Read up on research for chicken food - they are careful to add enough beta carotene to give the yolks a good color, and more expensive eggs add extra.
The research for chicken food is amazingly thorough.
The gas on a tomato really does ripen it, it's not just appearance (although that doesn't necessarily help the taste).
You actually don't want to pick a tomato when it's red (ripe), the best is to pick them just at the start of the ripening process (a hint of red), then put them in sunlight to let them finish, the taste and texture is much better because it doesn't get diluted with extra water if you left it on the plant (and also avoids the risk of the skin splitting).
With some plants they bred the ability to self ripen out of them, so ethylene gas is required. But I'm not sure if that was done to tomatoes.
I have never seen a supermarket egg with a dark orange yolk. When we first started getting farm eggs, I worried there was something wrong with them, was how jarring the difference is.
As for tomatoes, yes, that was my point: supermarket tomato color is the product of manipulation. Color is a necessary but insufficient indicator of quality. (I'm not saying there aren't good supermarket tomatoes, if you buy them at a sane time of year).
You suggest that battery farms are boosting beta carotene to alter the color of egg yolks. Ok, I believe you. What I'm saying is that I doubt that the family in Michigan who sells us dirty chicken eggs in the summer is manipulating the beta carotene content of their feed to market their eggs; they don't do anything to market their eggs at all. Whatever they're eating, it's (a) naturally high in beta carotene and (b) sharply different from what battery hens eat.
This has been my experience as well. Truly free-ranging hens give the best eggs, often almost up to the quality of ducks' eggs. Interestingly I find very little perceptible difference between the eggs of different breeds (once cooked at least), but roasted cocks of different breeds taste vastly different.
