The Egg Taste Test

This is not a food blog by any means, but I have been in the kitchen a lot lately. I love to cook. I love to eat. Therefore, I spend quite a bit of time in the kitchen. Well, this week, Bryan and I watched Food Inc. I have become fascinated with food and how it is produced. Just a few short weeks ago, I mentioned reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Add in some research of gardening, the purchase of seeds, the ordering of composting worms, the hunt for local produce and meats, and I am borderline becoming a hippie, as Bryan likes to call me. I don't care though, because it has been so fun. I am still very skeptical about some things though. So, I thought I would do some taste tests. My primary goal in all this is not necessarily to only eat organic foods or to only buy locally or even eat really healthy. All those things are great, but my primary goal right now is to determine if locally grown or raised produce/meats taste better. The same goes for organic. I am all about the taste. Of course, we have to take into account our food budget, but according to Barbara Kingsolver, if you buy locally grown, in season foods, it is actually cheaper than store bought non-local foods. The key is to stock up on in season foods and either freeze, can, dry, or preserve them for the rest of the year. We'll see how that goes this summer.
Today, Seth and I went to pick up a food order from a local farmer. The O'Daniel family owns a farm just outside of town and while they do offer a delivery service for a small fee on Saturdays, I opted to get out of the house and pick my order up. I got a lb. of ground beef, a lb. of pork sausage, half a pound of brussel sprouts, a pound of roma tomatoes, a head of butterhead lettuce, and a dozen free range eggs. Everything was either raised or hand grown by the O'Daniel family and I thought it was very reasonable in price. I only paid $22.50 for all of that!
As soon as I got home I made the most wonderful salad. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought the lettuce was the best I had ever tasted. My tomato was slightly under ripe, but still tasted delicious. I included a hard boiled egg in my salad and that is what really caught my attention. It was so good!
Luckily, I still had one regular white store bought egg in the refrigerator and I had a few brown eggs that came from free roaming, cage free, nesting hens (not organic). I had just bought a dozen local free range eggs so I decided today was the day for the egg test.

The pictures below have the eggs in this same order.

I love hard boiled eggs, so I boiled the eggs for this taste test. All were boiled for 15 minutes, then cooled under cold water before the shells were removed.


I sliced all of the eggs open to assess the insides.

I was surprised to see that the brown store bought and white store bought eggs had slightly paler yolks than the local egg. I would have thought only the white egg's yolk would have been paler.

I took one bite of each egg. The first egg, which came from the cage free, free roaming, nesting hens tasted slightly salty. Weird huh? The white standard egg was bland. The local egg had a very robust taste. Very eggy, but creamy. It lingered in your mouth for a few seconds after eating it. Then I tried them all again. I thought the first egg might not taste salty my second time around, but it did. The middle white egg seemed even more flavorless. The local egg was even more delicious, so in my opinion it won. While they are the most expensive, they definitely have the best taste.
*If I were to do this test again, I would have done a blind taste test, but I am pretty sure the results would have been the same. :)