Chinese Version
2021-05-06, Thursday, Sunny

In my childhood, the supply of pork meat was limited by government issued coupons, so each person could only have around half a pound per month; but the eggs sold in farmers’ markets did not require coupons. Therefore I ate much more eggs than pork when I was little. Delicious eggs hold several stories of my childhood. “Stealing Egg”, “Eggs Are Snacks, and Egg Flower Soup is Delicious.

My stories have shown that I really liked eggs when I was little. However for a while I didn’t eat eggs at all, around 2000s, before the mobile media prevailed. Because I often saw: “one day egg is drug” advertising on television. Although I could not understand why, I still followed the crowd and stopped eating eggs.

Around 2010, T and I became regular walking buddies. While walking together, we enjoyed chatting about food and travel. T loved egg fried rice very much, she talked about eating egg fried rice with a concise text and emotional tunes. Influenced by her, I started eating eggs again.

Then the new concept of “improving estrogen during menopause” and “boosting the immunity raised in COVID-19 in 2020″ made me eating two eggs daily, as I heard that eggs could improve my estrogen productivity and enhance my immunity.

A few weeks ago, we went to a farm to see free range chickens and also bought a box of eggs. Out of curiosity, we wanted to find out what was the special taste of farm eggs, which were much more expensive than organic eggs sold at the supermarket.

As we still stayed at home very idly, we conducted three taste tests in three weeks, and finally we tasted the special free range farm eggs.

We had a simple method to compare the taste: we put the eggs: two from the farm and two organic eggs from the supermarkets, into the same pot, cooked them for the same time, and then tasted the two kinds of cooked eggs.

In the first taste experiment, no one tasted the difference between the two kinds of cooked eggs. Although from closely observing the profile of half cut cooked eggs and it was noticeable that there was no gap between yolk and whites of farm eggs and an obvious gap between yolk and whites of eggs from supermarkets.

In the second taste experiment in the second week, one tasted the difference in yolks: the yolk of the farm eggs was more tender than the yolk of the supermarket eggs.

One taster came up with an assumption: “Farm eggs are more dense (there is no gap between yolks and proteins of farm cooked eggs), and heat is spread slowly, so the yolk of farm eggs is more tender than the yolk of supermarket eggs.”

This assumption was immediately refuted: “In general, the same composition and structure, the denser the matter the better in terms of the heat conduction.”

“If the ingredients or structures of the two kinds of eggs are different, then maybe farm eggs need more heat to solidify.”

While this assumption was considered possible, the small four eggs had already gone into the tasters’ bellies.

Later, I gave a friend two farm eggs and claimed: “We haven’t tasted the difference between the farm eggs and the supermarkets eggs so far.” My friend replied a few days later: “I felt like the farm eggs were tasty and I felt they were sweet.”

In the third taste experiment in the third week: The lack of a gap between the yolk and whites of farm eggs, versus the obvious gap between the yolk and whites of eggs from supermarkets was noticed again.

The tasters started to refine the process of eating by separating the egg whites and yolk to chew slowly, as they tried to taste the sweetness.

One tasted a difference in texture between the egg whites of the two kinds of eggs: “Chewing the egg white slowly, I felt the farm ones were harder and more unified than the supermarket ones.”

While chewing, the fact that the two kinds of eggs had different textures in their egg whites was soon confirmed by other tasters. Egg whites in farm eggs were harder and more unified than the ones in supermarket eggs.