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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?

[1] http://www.splendidtable.org/episode/july-17-2010

edit: (Or do you feel that this segment is malarky!)

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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).

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.

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.

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.

I heard the bit about baking soda in the water before, could you explain why it helps detaching the shell from the egg?

Baking soda is alkaline and breaks down proteins especially together with heat.

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).

> though would possibly make it inedible

Nope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_year_egg#Modern that's with alkaline, and you can use acid to make a pickled egg.

Looking at it, i'd consider it inedible :) But good to know that stronger bases have been used to do that kind of thing.

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.

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.

So, what do you recommend for fresh eggs?

I personally would soft-boil or fry sunny side up. But I like my runny eggs. ;)

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.

reads rest of comments

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.)

Oh. You're probably right. I have to test this!

Hm, eggs here in Sweden are generally washed, but not refrigerated, so it's neither like the situation in the UK nor the US. Interesting.

You can also tell a really fresh egg from a supermarket egg by visual inspection of them once they have been cracked on to a flat surface.

//deleted// feeble attempt at ascii art.

An unfresh egg has a flat white, with a dome for the yolk.

A really fresh egg has an extra raised bit just before the yolk. In cross section it has three levels, rather than two.

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.)

Older eggs are fine for baking though.

And they're even better for hard-boiling, as the shell is more easily removed.

Even unrefrigerated, fresh eggs last an amazingly long time. They aren't as pretty but are fine to eat.

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.

My guess is that a sighted test can always distinguish things that a blind one cannot.

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.

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.

I suppose similar things exist in the US?

*RSPB

Quite right, thank you.

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

It's free range, as opposed to caged way of keeping the hens.

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.

In the US, there are no legal standards in “free-range” egg production.

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.

It's the same in the Netherlands (marked [0-3]NL), so I guess it's a EU norm. 0 = organic, 1 = free range, 2 = barn (max. 9 hens/m2), 3 = battery

I think it's rather 0 - bio 1 - free range

[Following up: the answer appears to be "it's a designation for premium eggs at the supermarket".]

Well, it's a designation as to the conditions in which the chickens are kept.

You cannot be sure that is due to the eggs being free range. Chances are that the cheapest eggs also are less fresh.

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.

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.

Where are you? It is not helpful to say that without context.

Sweden.

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?

Increasing the size of the cages and allowing them outside, is not improving the conditions '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.

No, "free range" is a classification in Sweden with rules and cages are not allowed in those.

"free range indoors" means large stables, no cages, multiple levels and a maximum of 9 hens per m^2.

"free range indoors and outdoors" is the same as indoors, but with the addition of an outside yard with at least 4m^2 per hen.

Battery cages were banned in 1988, but cages are still allowed. max 13 hens per m^2 and max 16 hens per cage, and there needs to be a nesting area.

So it's not all crap, but the day when we can synthesize food cannot come fast enough.

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.

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.

Ever see the inside of a battery hen house? :|

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.

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