The description in "The Omnivore's Dilemma" of egg yolks from idyllically pasture-raised chickens is forever stuck in my memory.
"Between stops, Art mentioned that Joel’s eggs usually gave him his foot in the door when trying to land a new account. We stopped in at one such prospect, a newly opened restaurant called the Filling Station. Art introduced himself and presented the chef with a brochure and a dozen eggs. The chef cracked one into a saucepan; instead of spreading out flabbily, the egg stood up nice and tall in the pan. Joel refers to this as “muscle tone.” When he first began selling eggs to chefs, he’d crack one right into the palm of his hand, and then flip the yolk back and forth from one hand to another to demonstrate its integrity. The Filling Station chef called his staff over to admire the vibrant orange color of the yolk. Art explained that it was the grass diet that gave the eggs their color, indicating lots of beta-carotene. I don’t think I’d ever seen an egg yolk rivet so many people for so long. Art beamed; he was in."
I've yet to find an egg like that, though I've heard you can get them if you raise backyard chickens.
The color of an egg yolk is based on what the chicken ate and has no bearing on how idyllic their lives were. There are plenty of pasture raised chickens without the deep orange color because the plant material around them (you can get nearly white colored yolks from a hen that has literally miles of pasture around them).
If there a lot of capsicum peppers around for instance, the yolks will turn almost red.
How firm it is relates directly to how old it is and how it was treated, regardless of how they are raised. You can get an ultra-firm egg yolk from a factory farmed hen. The eggs you get in a supermarket however are typically several weeks old - long enough for the egg yolk to start to lose its firmness.
I really wish I could find labeling on what the chickens are fed... you really can't get it... I would suspect that Pasture-Raised with supplemental corn feed would be sufficient... I just wish it was part of the labeling.
IMHO it affects the taste and structure of the eggs more than the meat of chickens... I also notice the differences with beef a lot more too in terms of what they were fed. It would be really nice if meat, eggs and dairy could be better labelled as such. Then again, it would be nice to see slow-pasteurized milk make a comeback too.
I agree. The big food companies doesn't like it. So it doesn't happen. My brother in law, who researches the EU food industry told me that there are about 150 purchasing departments in the EU where the majority (I think it was high end, but can't remember the number) of food for 500 million people pass through. That is an awful lot of concentration of power over our food. Not surprising they like obscurity if they make more money that way.
If you look on the egg carton, there should be a 3-digit date code telling you when the eggs were laid. That code is the day number of the year (so 032 would be Feb 1, 182 is July 1, etc). I've gotten in the habit of figuring out which day number it currently is, then at least I know how old the eggs are that I'm getting.
Well, yeah, but I imagine "what the chicken ate" and "how idyllic their lives were" are pretty closely related. In any case, I've never once found a firm orange yolk in my eggs — supermarket, farmer's market, or otherwise. Joel is probably doing something right here. (Or maybe his eggs are just really fresh, I don't know.)
Good pasture and good nutrition helps for the firmness. If you want a rich, golden yolk, feed them marigold petals. It doesn't take much to really darken the yolk, and our birds seem to like them.
We get a deep, rich golden color from simply giving them cracked corn. That holds all winter as well, as we supplement heavily with cracked corn to help them stay warm.
Yes. I feed mine extra scratch in winter (cracked corn, wheat and something else I forget) to keep their body temperature up in the cold and it does keep the yolks looking good.
Also chicken scraps make a difference.
I picked up a dozen at the feed store last time I was there and except for the fact that the shells were brown or green, the eggs themselves were just like supermarket eggs in appearance and taste. Typical for being raised on the cheapest feed out there.
In the same book, he mentions that they have to keep their chickens inside during the winter, which means no bright orange color to the yolks during those months. Try again when the weather is warm?
Yolk color is a red herring, you can feed chickens in cages many things to affect the color of the yolk, and it has nothing to do with quality of life.
Generally quality of feed correlates to quality of life. Factory farmers aren't going to take the time to make sure a chicken gets greens and reds and yellows in their diet.
Just really fresh I think. Backyard chicken eggs from my coworker are like this. I don't know what the big deal about the firmness of the yolk is, but I'm not a pro chef. Tastes like an egg to me. When she gives me eggs, they last a really long time. She says that the way to tell if their old is by how fragile the yolk is. If it breaks going into the pan, then it's bad.
I went to whole foods and bought a bunch of different brands of eggs and cracked them at home to inspect them. I noticed a big difference between the ones that said "pastured" from all of the others. These were usually the orangest and firmest. The yellowest and weakest were the "omega 3 flax fed" ones. Words like "cage free" and "free range" didn't seem to make a difference.
If various articles I've seen on the topic are to be believed, eggs from pastured hens don't just look and taste different—they're far more nutritious than the rest[1]. I forget which nutrient (and I'm not certain it's even one of the ones listed at that link) but IIRC there's one that's very difficult to come by in the recommended quantities unless you 1) eat lots of insects, or 2) eat eggs and/or meat from birds that eat lots of insects. As one might expect, it's almost completely absent from non-pastured eggs.
See also declining nutrient levels in produce generally[2]. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that our ultra-low food prices, especially the US, amount to a scam.
We've got year-round variety (shipped from hundreds to thousands of miles away), we've got quantity, our produce is colorful (though bland), and our food rarely makes us sick (very nice, to be sure), but if you seek out quality there go convenience (distant 1 day/week farmers' markets versus a dozen nearby supermarkets that operate 24/7) and low prices, plus you've got to remember all the labeling and advertising tricks of the sort mentioned in the article so you don't get screwed.
In general, animals that eat grass and things that eat grass (insects, mostly) will have a much higher amount of Omega 3s than those that eat mostly corn and ground up animal byproducts.
iirc all omega3 in non-plants comes from their diet of plants. Similarly we make Omega3 eggs, by feeding them lots of omega 3. Someday we may have omega3 pepperoni pizza by feeding the cows a GMO corn that makes omega3. The more the consumer demands, the more industry will shift to provide, but sometimes it's a comedy. We wanted pasture chickens w/ omega 3 from grass, we got caged birds w/ flaxseed supplements.
Or feeding cows what they "naturally" graze on, namely, grass. Grass-fed beef has substantially more omega-3s than the grain-fed beef we eat today.
Even we humans have a ton more omega-6 in our tissues than we did before, largely because of our diets. In 1961, we ate diets of 5.8% omega-6s, and our adipose tissue concentrations of n-6 were 9%. Today, Americans eat around 9% of their energy as n6 fats, and they are 23%+ of our fat tissue!
As others have noted in this thread the "muscle tone" of eggs is largely affected by freshness. This is something that you really begin to notice with [sous vide cooked eggs](http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/10/sous-vide-101-all-about-e...) where the distinction between the 'tight' and 'loose' whites can have dramatic effects.
*"As eggs age, both the yolk and the tight white membranes will get thinner and more fragile. At the same time, the tight white will leak moisture into the loose white, diluting the loose white further and causing it to become even runnier."
That description seems very accurate to me. My grandmother (in Panama) raises her own chickens, and I even find the taste of the eggs they produce to be somewhat more intense. The eggs are also slightly smaller so they take less time to cook. I think this could also be due to the breed of the chickens. Incidentally the issue of breeds is one I think is too often overlooked. Here if one wants to raise one's own chickens, one usually buys them from a store no more than two weeks after they're born. It's very apparent that these tend to be of a breed that is more suited for large scale chicken meat production, which means they are more expensive to raise. There's a similar and better documented case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_pig , which IMO exemplifies one of the many reasons why food diversity is so important.
Actually, commercial egg producing and meat producing breeds are very different. A modern meat bird will be too heavy for its legs to support in about 9 weeks because they grow so fast. Layer breeds are the opposite: skinny so most of their feed goes into producing eggs and not body mass.
The breeds you buy for hobby egg production tend to more general purpose. You are correct in that they are less feed efficient.
Agree with Aloisius about the yolk color. My parents raise sheep and chickens on a farm. During the spring and summer the chickens eat almost all worms, bugs, grasshoppers. The yolks have this color to them. During the winter, the chickens eat feed and table scraps, and the yolks are not as brightly colored nor as flavorful.
About them breaking down over time, that hasn't been my experience. Eggs keep a long time, and at certain times of the year my parents have far more than they can eat. Even after 6-8 weeks in the fridge, the yolks have the same texture and color.
I've yet to find an egg like that, though I've heard you can get them if you raise backyard chickens.
I've seen very firm yolks in the Philippines, where the farm to store time is hours, not days or weeks like in the US. Eggs aren't refrigerated there like they are here, which I found hard to accept, but it turns out that if you wash the eggs on the farm (as is required in the US), you have to refrigerate them. In the Philippines the eggs aren't washed, so they keep a protective coating that keeps the egg fresh without refrigeration.
UK eggs, for instance - which typically have more orange yolks than their American counterparts - are stored at room temperature, while those in the U.S. are required by law to be stored at lower than 45 degrees Fahrenheit in order to prevent the risk of Salmonella spreading.
British grocery stores and households do not refrigerate their eggs because 90per cent of store-bought eggs in the UK come from hens that have been vaccinated for salmonella.
I don't have any links, but IIRC, PA had a pilot program back in the 80s or 90s to test and destroy infected birds. It was a great success but never expanded upon. Producers were able to push the risk and cost onto consumers instead of providing safe food.
Based on some experience utilizing RFID tagging in the vegetable and egg packing industries to meet regulatory and supplier freshness requirements:
US FDA final egg rule requires the holding and transporting of shell eggs at or below 45F ambient temperature beginning 36 hours after time of lay.
At a producer of any volume, eggs are gathered 2x daily, generally by automated machinery; occasionally still gathered by hand. Eggs are gathered as soon as hens lay them because warmer temperatures encourage physical/chemical changes that affect "freshness" adversely.
Justification of refrigeration can be found in the response to public comments on FDA final egg rule (where SE = salmonella) [0]:
The 36-hour limit for unrefrigerated holding is supported by a model, contained in the 1998 joint SE risk assessment (Ref. 21), which was developed to examine the relationship among holding time, holding temperature, and yolk membrane breakdown as an indicator of SE risk. (The yolk membrane separates the nutrient-rich yolk and any SE bacteria that might be present in the albumen; breakdown or loss of the yolk membrane results in rapid growth of SE present in the albumen.) The model showed that, at 70 to 90 °F (i.e., temperatures that might be observed in unrefrigerated egg holding areas in farms or warehouses or in transport vehicles), there was much less breakdown of yolk membrane in eggs held no longer than 36 hours than in eggs held no longer than 72 hours. According to the model, eggs held at 70°F will experience at least a 16-percent breakdown of yolk membrane after 36 hours and a 25-percent breakdown after 72 hours. Eggs held at 80 °F will suffer at least a 22-percent breakdown after 36 hours and a 39-percent breakdown in the yolk membrane at 72 hours. At 90 °F, there is at least a 33-percent breakdown after 36 hours and at least a 62-percent breakdown of the yolk membrane after 72 hours.
> Almost every other country except the US does not refrigerate eggs.
Isn't salmonella more of a US problem? It's not that the eggs will spoil, it's that the salmonella will reach a level that makes people sick if you don't overcook the egg.
"Almost every other country" doesn't wash their eggs, which strips the protective cuticle that allows eggs to remain safe at room temperature. They also immunize against salmonella.
Again, do you have any sort of credible scientific basis behind your claims?
Firmness is almost entirely a measure of freshness. Eggs you buy in the store are at least 1 week old. Eggs fresher than that are very difficult to peel, so they're aged before delivery to the store.
> I've yet to find an egg like that, though I've heard you can get them if you raise backyard chickens.
As a former back yard chicken owner, I can confirm the startling difference between typical store-bought eggs and fresh eggs when grass/greens are in season. They taste cleaner, as well.
The nearly-neon orange/yellow yolks are quite a sight. Over the past 15 years or so, I've noticed many mid-range egg brands seeming to have darker yolks, likely from some additive to the feed explicitly for that purpose -- kinda like dyeing cheddar cheese orange.
A couple sorts you can get from Whole Foods seemed like that to me: Vital Farms and Frenzs. (I haven't seen the latter in some time.) And sometimes eggs from a farmers market, though chances are still against it on any variety I haven't tried yet.
Backyard chicken owner here! Yup, very firm yolks. However the color can fade in the winter when they don't get many greens or sunlight. Evidently you can add turmeric to their feed to enhance the color, but I've never cared to try.
There's an interesting later passage about exactly that:
"Joel told me that when he first began selling eggs to chefs, he found himself apologizing for their pallid hue in winter; the yolks would lose their rich orange color when the chickens came in off the pasture in November. Then he met a chef who told him not to worry about it. The chef explained that in cooking school in Switzerland he’d been taught recipes that specifically called for April eggs, August eggs, and December eggs. Some seasons produce better yolks, others better whites, and chefs would adjust their menus accordingly."
"Between stops, Art mentioned that Joel’s eggs usually gave him his foot in the door when trying to land a new account. We stopped in at one such prospect, a newly opened restaurant called the Filling Station. Art introduced himself and presented the chef with a brochure and a dozen eggs. The chef cracked one into a saucepan; instead of spreading out flabbily, the egg stood up nice and tall in the pan. Joel refers to this as “muscle tone.” When he first began selling eggs to chefs, he’d crack one right into the palm of his hand, and then flip the yolk back and forth from one hand to another to demonstrate its integrity. The Filling Station chef called his staff over to admire the vibrant orange color of the yolk. Art explained that it was the grass diet that gave the eggs their color, indicating lots of beta-carotene. I don’t think I’d ever seen an egg yolk rivet so many people for so long. Art beamed; he was in."
I've yet to find an egg like that, though I've heard you can get them if you raise backyard chickens.