This thread has gone on way too long and is becoming and eggistential threat. ![[drinkers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/82916bed5ad74ac8470bc04089d9758b0c80c9fa.gif "drinkers"){kind=small}
I just got a carton of Eggland’s Best AA Large WHITE eggs dated 235 (which makes them 9 days since packing) so I can make a Lemon Semifreddo with Wild Blueberry Sauce for Steve C’s ByoBQ tomorrow.
I’m so EGGCITED! ![[swoon.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f425e8dac3e7344bee264da02e55428971be23a9.gif "swoon"){kind=small}
Sounds delicious! Better get crackin’ on that.
We feed our chickens a steady diet of meat and beer. On the plus side, you get extra meat, but butchering can be tricky.
On a serious note; don’t you guys have easy access to farm fresh eggs? In a market or roadside stand?
Generally not from the end of October until the beginning of May. Must be nice to be you 
But we live in Siberia. Those guys live in California, where the wine flows like wine and chickens never see snow.
Eggzackly!
Kevin,
This is, IMO, both counter-intuitive and counter factual. Why do you think that, of all the foods and drinks we consume, eggs are the one category in which there’s no quality gradation, no flavor differences, no better or worse? Really?
Counter factual? I presented two different published reports based on blind tastings. If you have evidence to the contrary, feel free to report it. As far as counter-intuitive goes, this is a wine board, and we should all know by now that there are many things people believe about wines that don’t hold up under careful scrutiny. The same is undoubtedly true for other foodstuffs as well.
Commercial egg production, whether white or brown, factory farm or free range, is largely based upon a very small number of highly inbred layer breeds which have limited genetic diversity that is the result of selection for high egg laying capacity and disease resistance. I haven’t studied their genetic relationships, but I bet they are closely related European breeds that have been further inbred (interestingly, Darwin was the first person to study the genetic origin of chickens, which he thought were descended from a wild fowl in SE Asia, which largely turns out to be true). Apparently they must not have been selected for dramatically different egg flavors (in contrast to grapes and some other domesticated plants and animals). It’s possible that the extremely high fecundity of these breeds minimizes the potential for such differences, I don’t know. It’s also possible, that less common breeds that are genetically more divergent might give rise to eggs that have noticeably different flavors. But these breeds are not typically employed by commercial operations. And it is conceivable that very different diets could give rise to different eggs (was it René Redzepi who was experimenting with feeding them plants that would yield a bright red yolk, although I think that was more for appearance than taste?), but I await evidence demonstrating this in eggs that we have common access to.
The hens’ diets can’t help but influence the eggs; do you also think that there are no flavor differences in the meat from one chicken to the next, from Bresse to Springdale (Arkansas)?
I put those egg tasting reports you cite in the same category as the report here that wine doesn’t continue improving beyond about five minutes after pulling the cork.
You might consider that you are comparing apples and oranges. Selective breeding is a powerful thing. But as I said, commercial producers (even fairly small ones) tend to use the same small number of breeds, different ones for egg production than for meat, which have been selectively bred for specific traits.
We are all familiar with the fast growing, big-breasted chickens that populate our grocery stores. It wouldn’t be surprising to me that if you raise something very different, like a Bresse chicken, it will have different characteristics, depending on what was selected for when the breed was created. Akage Washu wagyu tastes different than Angus beef, no matter what you feed them.
Was anyone breeding for eggs that tasted significantly different? We want eggs that taste like eggs, as many as possible in as short a time as possible, preferably white, so perhaps not not.
The evidence strongly suggests that most eggs that are available in significant quantities in the US are not much if at all different in flavor, irrespective of brown/white or organic/free-range/factory. Maybe your Bresse chicken’s eggs taste different, but I can’t easily buy them.
If you don’t believe in blind tasting, then let me introduce you to Dr. Miller. Those Bresse eggs will get 100 points (as long as we can see the label).