I know, I know — we’re obsessed with eggs here at CliqueClack Food. I am almost afraid to count the disproportionately huge amount of posts we’ve written about eggs, but is that really a negative thing? Nah….
You know that “brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh” commercial from your childhood? Yeah, that’s a load of crap. We get our eggs from our CSA Farm — can’t get a lot more local than that — and our eggs come in a rainbow of colors: brown, yes, but also white, eggshell (couldn’t resist), speckled, beige, even blue. The egg color depends on the variety of chicken that lays it, not where it is sitting when the egg pops out.
The way the eggs look on the inside is quite different too, as you can see from the photo we took of our sunny-side-up eggs cooking on the griddle (the CSA Farm egg is on the left). The yolks are a rich, deep yellow and considerably larger than the store-bought yolks.
You may think you’re doing a really great thing by getting cage free eggs from the market, and in a way, you are. The chickens have been happily frolicking, some of them even eating organic feed. So what’s the difference? Why don’t the cage-free eggs look and taste the same as the farm-raised ones?
Farmer Beth (as my four-year-old calls her) told us her dirty little secret, the reason why her eggs are best, and I’m going to share it with you: her chickens eat grass. There’s no telling what the free-range lots from the supermarket eggs are like; they could simply be dirt yards and the chickens are fed cheap, minimally nutritious feed. At Green Hill Farm, the chickens run free, all over the lawn. They nibble on the grass, they snack on the overripe veggies. You read about the omega-3 eggs sold in the stores? They’ve got nothing on the nutrition bursting out of our farm-raised eggs. And we’ve got the photos to prove it….
It is worth the legwork to find local eggs… for the nutrition, but also for the taste. The farm-raised eggs we get are more flavorful and rich; we’ve never eaten eggs this delicious before, and we’ve eaten a lot of eggs.
Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on Apr 19, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
Heheh, looks like the eggs we get here in Portugal. Although there are no white eggs to be found anywhere. My parents are always amazed when they visit at how orange the yolks are. My neighbor raises chickens, although they are kept in a coop, and they eat all kinds of stuff, kale, fruit, all kinds of veggie scraps, etc. The only disadvantage is that the eggs come in a variety of sizes, which makes it more difficult to use them in recipes.