Fresh Eggs

Have you ever had a fresh egg? A straight from the farm egg from a chicken not raised in a box and never allowed to realize that its legs were made for walking? I’m not sure that I ever had until recently. Even though I was buying organic eggs at Whole Foods I’m still not sure. I’d heard chef’s on TV talk about fresh eggs; had vendors at farmer’s markets try and sell me their “fresh” eggs but I’d always thought that an egg was, well, an egg.

Then I was reading Bill Buford’s Heat and came across the following passage on pages 182-83:

“Which was why I was in Porretta. It was also why I’d got so interested in the egg, because, on my first morning, watching Betta prepare the dough, I saw that an egg was a modern pasta’s most import ingredient, provided it was a very good egg, which was evident (or not) the moment you cracked it open. If the white was runny, you knew the egg had come from a battery-farmed animal, cooped up in a cage, and the pasta you made from it would be sticky and difficult to work with., exactly like the unhappy batch Betta produced one evening after Gianni fell asleep, having had too much wine at lunch, and failed to buy eggs from the good shop before it closed and had to drive to the next town to the cattivo alimentarii, the nasty store, and pick up a dozen of its mass-produced product. The yolk was also illuminating. The nasty store’s were pale yellow, like those most of us have been scrambling for our urban lives. But a proper yolk is a different color and, in Italian, is still called il rosso, the red bit, arising from a time when you ate eggs in the spring and summer, the egg season, and they came from grain-fed, half-wild, not just free-ranging but virtually proprietorial chickens that produced a yolk more red than yellow, a bright primary intensity that you can see today if you’re lucky enough to get your eggs not from a supermarket but a local mercato or a small farm.”

“A battery-farmed animal” boy, that phrase got me. I decided that I need to try and find out what all this fuss was about. I know a guy who raises chickens for their eggs and asked him if I could buy a dozen. He wouldn’t sell them to me, said he’d give them to me instead. I like to pay people for what I get but he insisted. I ended up splitting a dozen with another guy in my office.

I took the eggs home and it was like reading from that Buford passage verbatim. There was the white not too runny and the yolk, standing up straight and proud looking more like orange zest than orange juice. How did these eggs taste? Like nothing I’d had before. I had to have more. I called the guy up, no more eggs right now. The chickens were on strike. Actually, I think the chickens just weren’t producing enough for him to spare.

I became obsessed. I went to the Madison Farmer’s Market. I bought “fresh” eggs from a vendor there. I took home the eggs and cracked them open only to find a runny white and a lemon yellow yolk. What was going on? Had I just bought the same eggs I could have gotten at the A & P and paid twice as much for a dozen? I went back the next Thursday and asked the farmer. I didn’t want to accuse them of selling mislabeled eggs so instead I asked if their source for the eggs was reliable. I explained what had happened. The farmer looked at me, I looked back. “No one’s complained” she said. I wonder what she thought I was doing.

Next I ended up at someone’s house in Basking Ridge with a sign out front advertising fresh eggs. By now I’d done some reading. I knew that you really shouldn’t wash a fresh egg too thoroughly until just before you crack it. There is a protective coating on an egg that when washed away causes eggs to spoil faster. Commercial operators wash their eggs and then spray them with a mineral oil to help prolong shelf life. I also found out that you can tell the color eggshell a chicken will lay by looking at the color of its ears.* Why I needed this information I’m still not sure but it is interesting.

The Basking Ridge eggs were better than the eggs from the farmers market. The white had a better consistency but the yolk was still yellow. I was looking for what Buford described as “il rosso” and I wasn’t finding it. The refrigerator was filling up with eggs. I thought about making egg salad.

I went back to the guy who gave me the first eggs and asked him what made his eggs so good. No real surprise that it’s a combination of feed and lifestyle. The chickens are free to roam his yard during the day. They return to the coop in the evening to sleep and to be protected from the neighborhood fox. The feed is a combination of marigold petals, sunflower seeds and ground oyster shells. The egg yolks get some of that orange color from those marigold petals to be sure and the oyster shell helps make the eggshell sturdier. The feed is all organic, he said. I wonder if there is such a thing as organic oyster shell.

The good news is that more eggs are on the way. He’s just acquired some more chickens and come September he promises the eggs will be plentiful. Now if I can just figure out how to get him to charge me.

Until then I’ll be on the lookout for another source. Once you’ve had a really good egg there’s no turning back. There are other people in my area selling eggs from their homes. I guess I’ll be ringing some more door bells. Egg salad anyone?

*The information on eggs came from Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise, pages 192-195.