Depends entirely where you are in the U.S., I suspect. In the Midwest, it’s very uncommon to find brown eggs at your typical grocery store, and if you find them, they’ll likely be specifically labeled (and probably organic, too).
The age of eggs makes a very noticeable difference to the way an eggs fries, old eggs spread more and are thinner. When we had three hens in the garden that days eggs, the yoke stood up like a hemisphere and the white had a definite cliff like edge. A diet of slugs and scraps made the yokes dark orange too. Not even the best “organic” supermarket egg comes close.
I have heard that US egg producers wash a waxy preservative layer off of eggs, which increases porosity and reduces their shelf (counter, bowl) life. Eggs certainly do age, whether or not they go “bad” - older eggs can be hard to do certain delicate cooking operations with.
We keep our eggs (from our hens) at room temperature, as we do with our butter and various oils. Also, we ingest raw egg in smoothies and the like. Works for me.
I’ve never refrigerated eggs, and never felt any need to.
http://efoodalert.net/2011/07/29/salmonella-eggs-from-spain-do-it-again/
The UK’s Health Protection Agency reports that a batch of imported eggs has been linked to anoutbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis Phage Type (PT) 14b infections in England and Wales since the start of 2011.
One hundred and seventy-four (174) cases have been reported, including 77 from North West England and 35 from the West Midlands. The illnesses were traced to eggs from a single shed on one farm in Spain.
The UK is very safe. Not so the rest of the EU.
A similar EU report in 2006 showed that the UK was already the best country in Europe with a large national laying flock, with salmonellas of public health significance found on just 8 per cent of flock holdings. The UK was set a modest target of a 10 per cent year-on-year reduction and has met this with ease, with just 1 per cent of flocks testing positive in 2008. Those countries found to have higher levels of salmonella in the 2006 report were set higher percentage reduction targets, and it is likely to take a number of years before their levels of salmonella reduce to those in the UK.
In the European Union (EU), Salmonella enterica serotypes Enteritidis and Typhimurium are the salmonella types most frequently associated with human illness. A recent study, conducted on commercial large-scale egg-laying hen holdings with at least 1000 laying hens (Gallus gallus) in the 25 EU countries and Norway by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), found a range of salmonella levels in hens in these countries of between 0% and 79% [1,2]. The results also showed that samples taken on 20% of all large-scale laying hen holdings in the EU tested positive for S. Enteritidis and/or S. Typhimurium. A study across European countries has shown a high linear correlation between salmonella in egg-laying hens and human illness
This page says the FDA requires eggs to be refrigerated. This .gov page suggests the FSIS requires they are refrigerated, though it’s not entirely clear.
So the answer might simply be that the law requires them to be refrigerated in the USA but not the UK.
Here in Australia it seems to be optional. Some supermarkets keep them in a refrigerated section, some don’t.
In southern California you will find brown eggs in most super markets. However, 80% or more of the eggs for sale will be white.
I suspect that may have more to do with the chicken’s diet than anything else. I have no idea what they feed them, but the supermarket eggs I got in Hungary (also kept at room temperature) were about the same quality as eggs you get from a farmer’s market here. Brilliant orange-yellow yolks (not the pale yellow we get here), plump and firm, bursting with eggy goodness.
I would say the same for Chicago. Maybe 90%. But it makes no difference. Brown eggs, white eggs–they don’t taste any different so far as I can tell.
Temperature plays a part, but a big factor in the consistency of raw eggs is their freshness - a new laid egg has a thick, gelatinous white and a colourful, hemispherical yolk, but as they age, the white will be more relaxed and watery and the yolk fades and flattens.
Eggs poached by cracking directly in boiling water need to be really fresh, so that the firner consistency of everything keeps them all in one piece, but for some other recipes, chefs often swear by using older ones - cakes, for example, require eggs that are a little ‘relaxed’ in order to achieve a lighter and more open texture.
Boiled (including hard boiled) eggs can be quite difficult to peel if made from very fresh eggs.
In China and all of Africa, eggs are very much unrefridgerated.
When chickens feed naturally, the quality of the egg (including the color of the yolk) will change seasonally. Very old recipes will often call for “spring eggs”, which tend to have a deep orange yolk.
I live in the Northeast US and while brown eggs are available in most all supermarkets, their stocks of white eggs always outnumber them by at least 10 to 1. I’ve never been able to tell any difference between them whatsoever (besides the shell color).
On an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown about making perfect omelets he made the point saying to warm your eggs in warm (not hot) water for a few minutes because they cook faster (and therefore better). He then added that if you lived in France you’d skip that step because the French don’t refrigerate their eggs. It was the first time I’d ever head of this, I always thought eggs were as perishable as milk!
Yep. Our hens get all of our kitchen scraps, treats, you name it. They have a fenced yard to roam and eat bugs. I can’t wait till spring comes and we have good eggs again. I’ve purposely bought the most expensive eggs our local grocery store carries and they are nowhere close.
On the submarines I was on we didn’t refrigerate eggs. They were kept in the engine in the lower level. It was pretty cool there if we were in the North Atlantic, but they weren’t refrigerated. We ran out of eggs before they went bad.
Yeah, that was my experience with cage-free eggs. They’re triple the price of regular eggs, but look and taste the same (at least the ones I’ve tried.) I assume they all just get the same kind of all-grain diet. The only eggs that really taste and look different to me are free range eggs, where the chicken gets to go around eating bugs and whatever it can find in addition to its normal diet.
The eggs i had in England had very thick shells, deep orange yolks, and were much tastier than eggs in the US.
My understanding about brown v white shells is that it has to do with the breed of hen. Martha Stewart has hens that produce pastel-shelled eggs, and she based her line of paint colors on them.
The Uk had a salmonella scare a little while ago, and REALLY tightened up their egg regs and labeling. Likely the safest eggs around. I would not hesitate to eat a raw Uk egg, altho I’d still wash before cracking.
Taste depends a lot on what the chickens were fed, as **pulykamell **noted.
Talked to my friend the food inspector, he sez in the USA temps are not reliably cool, as in England, so we refrigerate our eggs, even tho it is not really necessary for freshness. As he said, nearly every store in the USA can refrigerate the eggs, so that’s what they do. Safer, but not critical.
It’s an easy and understandable assumption - after all, they spoil really fast once cracked.
But if you consider what an egg actually is, and how, in the wild, birds lay a whole clutch of eggs - often one per day, before starting to incubate them (this way they all hatch more or less together) - it stands to reason that eggs are in fact naturally packaged to remain fresh all by themselves.
Me too - I’m in the UK and I routinely eat raw egg without a second thought (usually in the form of cake batter leftovers from the mixing bowl).