Orange Egg Yolks

I was browsing channels when I happened upon Nigella's show right as she was cracking an egg and noticed how plump and orange the yolk was. Any idea were I can get eggs like those? I'm sick of the runny pale yellow ones and don't care if they cost an arm and a leg. Then again, how expensive can eggs possibly get anyway?

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Terragusto has lovely eggs - $4/dozen

What I'm going to suggest won't solve the problem of the yellow yolk or the weaker flavor, but a couple of weeks ago we picked up a carton of eggs from Jewel that were, amazingly, 4 days old.

I have never seen eggs younger than a week at the supermarket, and this beat all of the other eggs there by 7 days.

Anyway, the yolks, aside from their yellow color, stood up beautifully.

So my recommendation is that you spend a few minutes each time you go to the grocery store, checking the 3 digit number on every carton, which is the day of the year the eggs were processed and packaged (and probably laid).

The higher the number the better. Today is the 333rd day of the year, so any eggs packaged today will have 333 on their carton.

However, the Terragusto eggs aren't particularly expensive and are particularly impressive, so if you're ever in that neighborhood, it'd be worth your while to pick them up.

I've actually had egg yolk envy from Nigella as well but I always assumed it was because she's European and they do eggs (and so much more) better than we do.

However...i've been having breakfast on Saturdsys at Tweet in Uptown lately and the eggs they use have yolks that are are pretty darn close to orange. Best biscuits and gravy I've ever had in this town, too.

I have no idea who their purveyor is but give 'em a call.

OR go have some breakfast!

Tweet
5020 N. Sheridan Rd.
773-728-5576

Try Green City Market on Saturday. Wide variety of farmers selling their own eggs, most of them more orange and flavorful than supermarket eggs; have fun buying and trying different ones until you find the kind you like best-- there's plenty of good ones.

http://www.chicagogreencitymarket.org/

Does anyone know if this is true: I have read that it is better to buy medium or large sized eggs rather than extra large or jumbo, because the bigger eggs come from the older hens who may not be "in their prime" so to speak, and may producing larger eggs, but of lesser quality? Is there anything to this?

My best bet as to why Nigella's egg yolks are so yellow is that she's using eggs from hens that have been fed canthaxanthin. Canthaxanthin (a carotenoid) is approved for use in hen and salmon feed within the EU and is primarily used to make farmed salmon (who are otherwise deprived from their natural sources of carotenoids, i.e., krill and shrimp) look pink and those egg yolks look so orangish yellow (because egg producers have learned that customers want hyper-yellow yolks).

See: http://ec.europa.eu/food/fs/sc/scan/out81_en.pdf

Note: I don't think that the use of these additives is allowed in the U.S.

Incidentally, eggs coming from hens that have been fed canthaxanthin are marketed where I live (in Sweden) as extra healthy due to the elevated levels of antioxidents they contain.

Now, there seem to be only positive benefits stemming from the use of carotenoids in eggs and salmon but I've come to see those shades of yellow in eggs as a sign of manipulation. Fillets of wild, Baltic salmon are on sale at my local market placed directly next to farmed, Norweigen. The blaring pinkness of the farmed salmon is obvious and, compared to the muted pink of the wild, almost obnoxious. This past summer, I watched a farmer pluck a dozen, still-warm eggs from under the bellies from a dozen nonplussed hens before selling them to me. The yolks were dull-yellow when they saw daylight minutes before being made into a magnificent, eggy breakfast omelet.

Years ago, salmon was varying shades of pink, egg yolks were varying shades of yellow and no one thought much of it. Now, in a northern Europe full of hyper-pink salmon and neon-orange eggs, I'm busy looking for the dull stuff.

Bridgestone wrote:Fillets of wild, Baltic salmon are on sale at my local market placed directly next to farmed, Norweigen. The blaring pinkness of the farmed salmon is obvious and, compared to the muted pink of the wild, almost obnoxious.

What do you think of the taste of the wild salmon vs. the farm-raised version? Are the stores required to label them differently?

They are labelled as being different products. They are also different products with different prices. Sorry if I gave the impression that they were being sold as the same product.

The canthaxanthin has no effect on the flavor of any of the products so any taste differences that may exist would solely be a product of freshness and/or normal differences one would expect between wild and farm-raised products.

I prefer to purchase the wild salmon but here we're getting into yet another pitfall of modern life and that is that wild Baltic salmon is pretty polluted. It has enough DDT and PCBs in it that one is really not recommended to eat it more than once a week (once a month for pregnant and nursing mothers). Actually, it was recently in Swedish news that one can eat more than one serving/week if one eats from the tail section of the salmon (as opposed to the fatty belly area). Farm-raised salmon suffers from these problems to only a very limited degree.

Pretty depressing, really...

Bridgestone wrote:I prefer to purchase the wild salmon but here we're getting into yet another pitfall of modern life and that is that wild Baltic salmon is pretty polluted. It has enough DDT and PCBs in it that one is really not recommended to eat it more than once a week (once a month for pregnant and nursing mothers). Actually, it was recently in Swedish news that one can eat more than one serving/week if one eats from the tail section of the salmon (as opposed to the fatty belly area). Farm-raised salmon suffers from these problems to only a very limited degree.

Pretty depressing, really...

I find the wild fish to be better tasting. I think eating most any domestically raised meat these days is something you need to look into to see what you're actually consuming. Over here steroids, antibiotics, hormones, reprocessed animal "by-products", and who knows what else are routinely fed to most livestock raised by the big agra-biz corporations. Who the hell knows what it's doing to our health? It is depressing how the world is polluting the waters and no one seems to care as long as money is being made. I wonder what we'll eat after we kill off all of our natural food sources.

(I agree completely with what you're saying, Cogito but I couldn't help myself...)