I had the chance to spend some time with my fellow healthy food blogger Jaya Patel last week. We were playing around making some videos in her kitchen. When we were done, she treated me to some of her Golden Eggs. She and her daughters have been keeping three pet backyard chickens. These are some fluffy, fat, well-spoiled chickens, eating organic feed, snacking on organic unsweetened coconut shavings, free-ranging around the grassy back yard and playset. When Jaya gave me the eggs she said “Those are like gold.”
She was so right. I took her golden eggs to class with me this week. My vegetarian class was working on breakfast foods so I thought it would be a great time to compare them to Kroger’s Simple Truth Natural brand of eggs. (Simple Truth is Kroger’s mostly organic line, and their commercial eggs are cage free and grain fed.) We cooked up one each as a sunny-side-up fried egg and a scrambled egg. As you can see from the photo, the difference in color is quite noticeable. One of my students said that the commercial egg yolk tasted chalky in comparison. The egg white of the commercial egg was much thinner (and they were fresh eggs, just purchased) and spread out more when cooked. I thought the home grown yolk tasted much richer.
You are what you eat. These awesome and delicious eggs from spoiled chickens are a fabulous example of that old saw. It is so important to know where your food comes from and how it was grown. Eggs and dairy are especially important because they are a concentrated form of everything the animal has ingested. When animals are fed inferior diets and endless pharmaceuticals, the end products are going to be inferior as well. I didn’t even try to compare these eggs to the cheapest commercial eggs on the shelf. I stopped buying them a long time ago. The thing I notice about them when I encounter them now is how thin those white eggshells are. To crack an organic egg you have to actually rap it firmly against a hard surface. A commercial eggshell is so fragile it hardly takes any pressure to crush it. It’s like I don’t know my own strength!
Our golden eggs from backyard chickens complimented a fantastic vegetarian breakfast that included Creamy Mushroom Stoneground Grits, Fried Polenta with Maple Syrup, and charming Carved Melon Bowls with Fruit Salad.
