Which egg tastes better?
Showdown between supermarket brands and the backyard flock Eggs collected from the backyard coop are better-tasting than store-bought.
Restaurant critic Amy Pataki and her family decided to rent chickens this summer. This is the eighth in an occasional series on backyard livestock.
I’m not the first restaurant critic to fall under the spell of a backyard chicken.
Back in 2001, William Grimes of the New York Times adopted a runaway black Australorp hen who appeared outside his Queens home one winter’s day.
Grimes found the chicken to be “the ideal pet,” an undemanding animal that produces an endless supply of fresh eggs.
So it is for me. Chickens have become fun and useful, not just fodder for restaurant reviews.
Like Grimes, I sought to know if our eggs taste better than store-bought.
We collect two eggs a day from our flock of three. This is normal. (A hen ovulates almost daily, regardless of a rooster.)
Our eggs come in a range of speckled browns. They are medium in size although once a week, Blair lays a doubleyolked egg that is appreciably larger.
In our family of five, my husband Janos is the most dedicated egg consumer. He fries one daily for breakfast, stacking it on whole wheat toast for an open-faced sandwich. I take mine hard-boiled or fried over easy, while the kids prefer scrambled.
When there’s a surplus, I bake a cake.
We keep the eggs on the kitchen counter in a ceramic holder from France.
That is how they’re stored there and in other parts of the world.
Eggs can stay at room temperature for weeks because they are protected by a natural antibacterial coating called the bloom. In Canada, though, eggs are washed and sanitized, thus removing the bloom and necessitating refrigeration.
For the taste test, I used both conventional (Burnbrae Farms) and organic (free-run PC Organic) supermarket eggs. All were fried in a non-stick pan with a hint of unsalted butter.
Even raw they differed. The organic egg had a wrinkled yolk and a white that spread like water. The egg white, or albumen, consists of thick and thin parts.
This was the oldest egg in the group, nearing the best-before date stamped on its shell.
The conventional egg had a blood spot or ruptured blood vessel, rare but edible. Our egg, laid that morning by Blair, boasted textbook thin albumen plus a single yolk.
Cooked, the organic egg had a nice yolk but a filmy white. The conventional egg had a sticky, chalky yolk and a spongy white.
Our egg was the clear winner. The white was firm but not rubbery, free of flavours picked up from the refrigerator.
The yolk was pleasantly rich, “a mixture of creamy and meltin-the mouth. Now I like yolks!,” said Inara, our 10-yearold daughter.
I credit freshness. A still-warm egg will always beat out the supermarket version.
I kept a printout of Grimes’s chicken article all these years as an example of great feature writing. (And headline writing: “It Came. It Clucked. It Conquered.”)
Only recently did I learn Grimes wrote a followup. His chicken disappeared. The nameless hen, who left as mysteriously as she came, had earned her place in Grimes’s heart.
The loss was more than fresh eggs.
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