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Eggs

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top 1000French
French

By Damien Pignolet

Published 2005

  • About

There is no substitute for an egg collected from a backyard chook-house, as I was very lucky to experience in childhood. Chickens raised in free-range conditions on a grain diet supplemented with vegetable scraps produce eggs of amazing flavour with richly coloured yolks, while access to shell grit hardens their shells.

Really fresh eggs will make much lighter cakes and soufflés, as well as very flavoursome homemade pasta dough. Poached fresh eggs will be neatly rounded while the whites of older eggs tend to dissolve into the water, leaving the yolk as a lonely yellow ball. Even fresh eggs laid by older birds are likely to produce a weaker albumen structure leading to poorer binding of custards and emulsion sauces — the ideal age for a laying hen is between 6 and 12 months.

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