Thursday, October 23, 2008

Duck Eggs

Somebody—probably Carlin—is now laying an egg a day. She started last week, but was still perfecting her technique, squeezing out all sorts of shapes and sizes. Including a SAN-reducing super-egg with a nightmarish interior upon which I won't dwell.

But this week it looks like she's got it down, and every afternoon I've gone out to say hello and retrieve the day's production and there it is, one slightly-brown-tinted medium egg sitting on the straw of the chateau des poules.

For dinner one night we had an egg-off: in one bowl, chicken egg omelette. The other bowl had a duck-egg omelette. In a tortilla and with cheese, could we tell the difference? (My friend Dana says she can tell the difference between the Lakenvelder eggs and those from the Wyandottes.)

I don't know if my palate is that good. The backyard chicken eggs are so very, very...eggy. Take a tomato purchased from your supermarket and put it next to one pulled out of the garden. That backyard tomato packs a wallop of flavor and smells. The tomato from the supermarket has the form of a tomato, but really, not the taste. Not next to the homegrown example. It's the same with the eggs: supermarket egg looks right but has very little taste compared to an eggs squeezed out by someone with a name and personality and a mission to rid your yard of every last pumpkin spider. (Thanks, Greta and Gamma Ray!)

So the omelette in the first bowl tasted very strongly of, uh, eggs. But it was good. We grated some more cheese and prepared tortillas with the omelette in the second bowl. It tasted...different. I suppose people who dislike the taste of lamb or venison might describe the taste as "different" or "strong," and although I like lamb and venison, I now know that I do not like duck eggs, at least in omelette form.

Bummer.

They're probably fine for baking. Probably. Dustin suggested making zhong, which I like, so maybe, maybe...

Anyway, that's the story with the duck eggs.

2 comments:

Kym said...

We use to have duck eggs when I was a kid. At first I didn't like them at all but after awhile they grew to be okay. But they were best for baking.

Bones said...

I took the plunge and used some in a pumpkin pie. No weird ducky taste—yay!