- [Amiel] These, my friends, are eggs.
A little while ago, I looked
at just about every way
you could cook a chicken egg,
but that just made me curious about
all the other types of eggs out there.
How different is a chicken
egg from an ostrich egg?
How different is a bird
egg from a fish egg?
And most importantly,
how do they all taste?
Today we're gonna look at
12 different types of eggs
from 12 different animals
and use them in 12
distinctly different dishes.
Through this we'll discover
what makes each of these eggs unique.
I'm Amiel Stanek, editor
at large of Bon Appetit,
and this is "12 Types of Eggs."
[paper whooshing]
Let's start with some basics.
An egg is a vessel meant
to nourish and protect
an animal's offspring
until it's better capable
of surviving on its own.
If the egg isn't fertilized,
there's no offspring that needs to use
all of the vitamins,
minerals, fats, and protein
packed inside that protective shell,
and another animal, in this case us,
can take advantage of them.
The egg that we're most familiar
with is the chicken egg.
Before being domesticated,
the wild precursor to the modern chicken
might lay around 10 to 15 eggs a year.
But through selective breeding
and the use of artificial lighting
and temperature management,
that number has soared
to 250 to 300 a year.
Chicken eggs come in all different sizes,
but an average large egg
weighs around 55 to 60 grams.
They also come in a
whole rainbow of colors.
Some people have an idea that
brown eggs are green eggs,
or somehow inherently
healthier than white eggs.
But in reality, the color of the egg
doesn't have anything to do
with the quality of the egg.
The color is determined
by the breed of chicken.
Leghorns lay white eggs,
Rhode Island Reds lay brown eggs,
and descendants of the Araucana breed
lay blue or green eggs.
Let's take a look inside, shall we?
The inside of a chicken egg
is pretty much equal parts yolk and white.
You'll notice that the white,
also called the albumen,
is comprised of both a
firm part and a runny part,
which is totally normal.
The albumen tends to get
runnier as an egg ages.
You'll also notice that
the color of the yolk
can differ between eggs,
and this has everything to
do with the chicken's diet.
A darker yolk doesn't mean
the chicken it came from
was healthier per se.
It simply means that its
diet was made up of foods
with high levels of yellow pigment.
Hens that eat more corn or alfalfa
will produce eggs with darker yolks
than those of hens fed
more wheat or barley.
All right, let's take a look at these
once they've been cooked.
Here we have a fried chicken egg.
You can see that yolk in the middle,
surrounded by the firm white,
and the runny white which spread out
as the egg hit the pan.
The yolk is still plenty
runny, barely cooked,
while the white has crisped
up nicely around the edges.
When we cut into it,
the yolk just oozes out
like that, it's beautiful.
I'm gonna get a bite
that's got a little yolk
and a little white in it.
Hmm.
The rich yolk just kind
of coats your mouth
and the white is mild
and clean and bouncy.
Who doesn't love a fried egg?
And while that's certainly the
simplest way to cook an egg,
there's probably no more iconic
and beloved expression of it
than the French omelet.
So what distinguishes the French omelet
from any other kind of omelet
is that it's perfectly pale and rolled
rather than being folded.
When you cut into it,
you can see that the inside is actually
still runny and soft.
The French call it [speaks
in foreign language],
which means something like slobber.
Nice, right?
Hmm, that is so delicious.
The richness of the egg yolk
and the lightness of the white,
they're fully integrated
and cooked ever so gently
so they're super tender.
There's also a good
amount of butter in there
which really backs up the
grassy creaminess of the eggs.
This would go great with a cup of coffee,
or maybe a glass of red wine.
Hmm, yum.
The next egg we're looking at is
the ostrich egg.
The ostrich is the world's largest bird,
so it should come as no surprise
that it lays the world's largest egg.
The ostrich egg is the equivalent
of two dozen chicken eggs
and weighs just over three pounds.
Weirdly, though, ostrich
eggs are the smallest egg
in relation to the size of
the bird they come from.
When you shake it up,
you kind of feel like something
rattling around in there.
The shell is smooth and
hard and really thick,
up to three millimeters,
so I'm not sure if
banging it on the counter
is even gonna break it.
[egg thuds]
Yeah, no.
I'm gonna need to break out the big guns.
[egg crackling]
I'm gonna use this hammer
to just kind of chip away in a circle,
and then peel back a little
piece of the shell at a time.
Oof, it's starting to ooze.
Gnarly, okay.
Let's dump it out.
Oh dear Lord, it is truly shocking
just how much fluid there is in here.
I made a big bird-sized mess, yuck, okay.
Well, there is a whole
lot of egg going here.
A lot of runny white,
and the yolk is weirdly firm,
almost like it's already been cooked.
And the firm white is
very thick and bouncy.
I'm gonna have to use a
knife to break this yolk.
Wow, it smells very odd.
Oh God, the yolk is really, really thick,
like the yolk of a ramen egg, almost.
This is a lot to take in, I
can't look at this anymore.
Okay, so here we have
our fried ostrich egg.
Look at the size of this thing.
It's really crazy.
You can see how much of
the lighter, runnier yolk
spread out thin and browned significantly.
It almost has a dosa-like texture.
And the rest of the cooked white
has an almost blue-ish,
green, gray tint to it
and feels really firm.
I feel like I need a
dagger and a pitchfork
to get into this.
Ooh, yeah, very tough.
The yolk is runny but crazy thick,
and it smells kind of musky.
You know, it doesn't taste nearly as crazy
as I thought it was going to.
Definitely more buttery
than a standard chicken egg
with a sort of [mumbles]
kind of funky aftertaste.
The texture is disconcertedly meaty.
But not nearly as weird as
I thought it was gonna be.
For the dish, I thought,
what better to go along
with this giant bird
than a giant deviled egg?
This is pretty horrifying.
The texture is really weird.
The white is really rubbery, very firm.
It doesn't have that tender quality
you'd expect in a deviled egg yolk.
I'm gonna, never mind, I'm
just gonna use my hands.
[grunts] Oof, well, combining
that yolk with mayonnaise
really takes it over the top.
It's so fatty, it's kind of nauseating.
And the hard-boiled white
texture is almost plastic-y,
kind of like too firm jello.
Don't get me wrong, it's
a beautiful deviled egg,
but I don't think I really
wanna eat this ever again.
Next up, we've got a quail egg.
The quail egg is the smallest
commercially available egg,
weighing in at just nine grams a pop.
They're about 1/6 the
size of a chicken egg,
and these shells are really beautiful.
They have these dark brown speckles
laid over a light brown
shell, really pretty.
Let's crack it open.
You know, that membrane
underneath the shell
is actually pretty tough,
so it's a little bit hard to
kind of pull it apart cleanly.
Look at this teeny, tiny egg.
It seems like we may have busted the yolk
a little bit, oops.
The ratio of yolk to
white seems to be tilted
in favor of the yolk.
There's not a whole lot of the firm white
that we're used to with a chicken egg.
It all seems quite runny.
I'm really excited to see this one cooked.
So here we have our fried quail egg.
Obviously it's a lot smaller
than our chicken egg.
We can see the white kind
of spread out quite a bit
because it was so loose.
You know, cutting into
this seems kind of silly.
I may as well eat the whole thing, hmm.
Definitely a bit richer
than our chicken egg,
which probably has to do
with the yolk-to-white ratio.
It has a slightly gamey, kind
of wild bird quality to it,
but on the whole it's pretty mild
and I think that most people
would probably have a hard time
distinguishing this from
a standard chicken egg.
For our dish, we decided on kwek kwek,
a popular street food
from the Philippines.
Hard-boiled quail eggs that
have been skewered, battered,
and deep-fried, yum.
This coating is really something else.
It's orange because it
contains Magic Sarap,
a common Filipino spice blend.
We're just gonna take one
of these off the skewer
and go ahead and dip it
into our tangy sauce.
Hmm, it's really tasty.
The batter's a little bit chewy,
which is a cool contrast
with the slightly bouncy
hard-boiled quail egg.
The yolk is a little bit chalky,
and that's because it's challenging
to boil such a small egg
without overcooking it.
But honestly, I'm not
tasting a ton of egg here
because the flavor of
the batter and the sauce
is pretty strong.
Hmm, it seems like the quail
eggs are more of a novelty here
than anything else.
It's fun to snack on a bunch of tiny eggs,
it makes me feel like a giant.
Okay, next we're gonna
look at the rhea egg.
The rhea is a bird that
looks similar to an ostrich,
only it's a little bit smaller
and is native to South
America rather than Africa.
This thing is beautiful.
I love this buttery yellow speckly color,
and the shape of the egg
is pretty distinctive too.
It's remarkably pointy on this end.
This is the equivalent
of about 10 chicken eggs,
so that makes it about half
the size of an ostrich egg.
The shell is definitely
quite hard and, yep,
looks like I'm gonna have
to get the hammer out again.
Yeah, this definitely feels
kind of like a mini ostrich egg.
[egg crackling]
Oof, got a gusher, wow.
There it is, a whole lot of egg.
The yolk feels really firm,
like, really, really firm.
I can pick it up and it's not gonna break.
It almost feels like a
yolk-y water balloon.
There's quite a bit of watery business
but still has a nice, thick albumen.
The more I touch this yolk,
I can tell that the liquid
inside isn't that thick
the way that the ostrich yolk was,
but it's just that the
membrane surrounding it
is really firm.
When I pierce it, the
liquid just kind of runs out
and has the thickness of an over-medium
chicken egg yolk, wild.
Well, now that I've made a
big mess, let's fry one up.
This fried rhea egg kinda looks like
you put a chicken egg in some
kind of enlarger machine.
How perfect does that look?
The albumen stayed nice and tight,
but it does have a slightly
gray blue sort of sheen to it,
and it's sort of wrinkly looking.
Let's get ourselves a slice.
Hmm, wow.
That's really something.
It has a fairly strong flavor.
There is kind of a toastiness going on,
kind of like a cooked grain or popcorn.
It's really interesting and distinctive,
but kind of a lot to handle.
I don't think I can eat
a whole one of these.
For our dish, we prepared
a classic Spanish tortilla.
This is a tapas staple.
A beautiful potato onion fritada
that's often served cold
or room temperature.
You can see from the side
that there are pieces
of tender confit potato and onion in there
that are kind of suspended
in the cooked egg situation.
Usually you would make this
with a whole bunch of chicken eggs,
but one single rhea egg was
enough to fill up our pan,
which is pretty cool.
I'm gonna cut ourselves
a little bite here.
Hmm.
I love that.
You know, I think that the rhea egg
was a really good choice for this.
That grain-like flavor I was describing
plays really nice with the
earthy potato and onion flavors.
Delicious, somebody get
me a glass of Sherry.
Next on the docket is
our duck egg.
On average, duck eggs
are around 30% bigger
than a chicken egg.
Their shells are slightly
thicker than chicken eggs,
but this one looks almost translucid,
which makes this a good
time to talk about candling.
Candling is when you shine a light
through the shell of an egg
to determine if it's
been fertilized or not.
This egg clearly hasn't been fertilized,
but if it had been,
you could see the outline
of the chick inside
and check out the embryo's development.
Even though it hasn't been fertilized,
you can still see some
anatomical features of the egg.
You can clearly see the air cell
which which provide the chick with air
until it's ready to breathe on its own,
as well as the yolk
floating in the albumen.
Okay, so now that we've determined
there's no baby duck in this egg,
it's safe to crack it open.
The membrane is a little
bit more tenacious
than that of a chicken egg,
and right off the bat
you can tell the yolk
is much larger than the white.
Which isn't really white at all,
it's almost completely clear.
The yolk is quite firm,
but nowhere near as firm
as the rhea egg was.
Okay, anybody ordered a fried duck egg?
What a beaut.
What's really remarkable to
me is how white the white is.
It was practically clear when raw,
but now that it's cooked,
it's really, really white.
It's really fascinating.
All right, let's get a bite going.
Hmm, that's delicious.
Honestly, it tastes extremely
similar to a chicken egg
but much richer and creamier.
I think I'd have a hard time
eating two of these for breakfast,
but they'd make a great
addition to an egg dish
that you wanted to give a
little extra richness to.
Okay, let's get to our
cooked duck egg dish.
Egg drop soup.
So, if you've never had
egg drop soup before,
it's a very simple Chinese soup
made by streaming beaten egg into a broth
so that the egg cooks and
forms into cute little ribbons.
I personally love eating it for breakfast
because it's kind of like
scrambled eggs and soup
all in one.
Hmm, it's so good with the duck eggs.
Because they're a little bit richer,
they add some extra depth and heft
to an otherwise light dish.
I'm into it.
So now that we've looked at duck,
duck, goose!
The average goose egg is
more than twice the size
of the average chicken egg.
It weighs around 140 grams,
and the shell is much stronger.
It has this gorgeous mat finish
and it's slightly longer and more pointed,
kinda like a cross between
our duck egg and the rhea egg.
As you can see, the white is thin
and nearly completely clear,
almost like our duck egg.
That yolk is very dense-feeling.
I cannot wait to see this one cooked.
Okay, so here we have a
big, bright, beautiful yolk,
and the thin white kind
of ran all over the place.
I'm gonna cut into it.
Wow, yeah, that yolk
is very, very viscous.
You can see that it has a thicker texture
than you'd get from a regular
fried chicken egg yolk.
Hmm, yum.
It's really fatty and the
white almost has a kind of
nutty sort of flavor
with an almost mushroom-like savoriness.
That's really special.
I don't think I was expecting
it to taste quite so unique.
I'm really excited to try this one in.
Oh, okay, guys, I told you.
Cash or check only.
All right, eggs in purgatory.
So this is a simple rustic Italian dish
of eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce.
You crack the eggs right
into the bubbling sauce
so the whites firm up but the
yolk stays nice and runny.
I'm gonna dig in here, hmm.
You know, this dish
really is extra special
with the goose egg.
They're so rich and flavorful,
and that contrasts really nicely
with the aggressive
acidity of the tomatoes
and the sharpness of
the chilis and garlic.
I wish I had a hunk of
focaccia or something like that
to sap up all that runny yolk,
but this is a real winner, yum.
Now we're gonna take a
look at a pheasant egg.
The pheasant is about half
the size of a chicken egg.
They weigh about 30 grams,
and their shells have
this amazing olive color
and this cool teardrop shape.
Let's get one opened.
Wow, this is harder than
I thought it would be.
The shell is thick and
the membrane is tough,
it's a bit hard to get it open.
Wow, look at that.
The yolk is so, so yellow,
and definitely the white is
kind of on the looser side.
The ratio is tilted somewhat
in favor of the yolk.
All right, let's fry one up.
So it doesn't look all that different
from the standard chicken
egg, just smaller,
although the white definitely ran more
so it has a bit of a lower profile.
Cutting into it, the
yolk feels pretty rich.
Hmm, yeah, I'm getting
kind of a wild vibe,
like this came from an animal foraging
on insects and leaves
and things like that.
It definitely tastes kind of grassy,
kind of undomesticated.
Really tasty, though.
Let's try this one in a platter of
huevos divorciados.
This is a Mexican dish, a
variation of huevos rancheros.
The eggs are fried and then
placed on top of tortillas
and hit with two different
sauces, one red, one green.
I can't wait to try this one.
Hmm, delicious.
The pheasant eggs are creamy,
and the earthy flavor they
have really compliments
the corniness of the tortilla,
and I love the way the acidic salsas
cut the richness of the yolk.
I think all the other flavors in this dish
would kind of overpower a more subtle egg.
I'm really enjoying this.
Next in our lineup is a guinea hen egg.
The guinea hen is a tough bird.
While they are domesticated,
they're a lot wilder and scrappier
than your average backyard chicken,
and they're much more better
suited to extreme climates.
This shell is really pretty,
brown with this kind of
uniform speckling all over.
It's a little smaller
than our pheasant egg.
Let's get this one into the dish.
Wow, this feels almost impossible to open.
You know, guinea hens have a
habit of hiding their eggs,
so I guess that extra
tough shell comes in handy.
Definitely yolk heavy, kind of shiny,
and the white is quite firm here.
I haven't seen a lot of that today.
Almost no runniness at all,
it's similar to a chicken egg in that way.
I'm excited to try this one cooked.
Wow, this almost looks like one of those
fried egg-shaped gummy candies.
It's so perfect, it almost looks fake.
The white is thick and mounted tightly,
not runny like our other eggs.
Big yolk energy here.
I'm just gonna take this one whole.
Hmm, super, super creamy.
On the richer side but definitely lighter
than, say, our goose egg.
It definitely has a little bit of a grassy
vegetal quality to it,
but not so distinct
that I'd be able to tell the difference
between this and a chicken egg.
Really fun, though.
Let's check this out in
an enticing egg curry.
Here we have a South
Asian curry of potatoes,
tomatoes, ginger, garlic,
and a whole bunch of spices,
and then we added our
hard-boiled guinea hen eggs
right at the end.
It smells incredible, super aromatic.
Let's get a little piece of egg here.
Hmm, huge flavors here.
I feel like the slightly smaller
size of the guinea hen egg
works well in this dish,
but the flavors are so strong
that they kind of overpower
the more subtle qualities of the egg.
The yolk is also a hair overcooked
because the hard-boiled eggs
cook, again, in the sauce.
But on the whole, I really
love this preparation.
Time to move on from bird eggs
and take a look at salmon roe.
The word roe simply refers
to the unfertilized eggs
of fish and other marine animals.
The main difference between
bird eggs and fish eggs
is that fish eggs don't have a shell.
It's not as important for
fish eggs to have a shell
since they don't have to
worry about staying hydrated.
The other big difference is
that fish eggs are smaller.
Instead of laying one egg at a time,
fish lay hundreds or even thousands,
because rather than having a
mother hen to care for them,
baby fish are typically
left to fend for themselves,
so they have a much lower survival rate.
So here we have our beautiful salmon roe.
Like most other edible fish eggs,
these have been cured with salt
as a way of both seasoning
and preserving them.
As you can see, these beads
have an amazing orange red color
and contain a darker part
that almost looks like a yolk.
We're using a mother of pearl spoon here
because certain metals
can interact with the roe
in a weird way that produces off flavors.
All right, I'm gonna take a spoonful here.
Hmm, the eggs are so delicate.
They just kind of burst
at the slightest pressure
and this briny, fishy,
umami-packed liquid oozes out, yum.
Ooh, it's so tasty.
I just want another spoonful.
Hmm, hmm.
And since salmon roe
is so popular in Japan,
we decided to make some sushi.
This is just about as simple as it gets.
A little nugget of seasoned
sushi rice as a base
with a piece of dried toasted
seaweed, also known as nori,
wrapped around it to
form a vessel of sorts
for a couple of spoonfuls of salmon roe,
which is known as [speaks in
foreing language] in Japan.
Down the hatch.
Hmm, that's a mouthful.
The thing that's so beautiful about this
is that the eggs have such
a strong, salty flavor
that pairing them with
some mild starchy rice
makes a lot of sense.
It really offsets all of that richness.
And the nori adds a little
bit of its own oceanic flavor.
Hmm, so delicious.
You know, salmon roe is great,
but when it comes to fish eggs
the undisputed champ is
Ossetra caviar.
The word caviar refers to salt-cured roe
from sturgeon very specifically.
All caviar is roe, but
only some roe is caviar.
As with the salmon roe we tried,
a very precise amount of
salt has been added to this
for taste and preservation.
This is one of the fanciest,
most sought-after caviars money can buy,
and I'm lucky enough to get to taste some.
As you can see, the individual
eggs are much smaller
than the salmon eggs
and a lot darker in color,
almost gray green, super delicate.
I'm gonna give it a taste.
Hmm.
Super salty, but there's
also a pronounced buttery,
kind of nutty quality.
God, that's good.
Sometimes, when people eat caviar,
they just put some onto
the back of their hand
which actually warms it up slightly
to make it taste more.
Hmm, I could eat this whole tin.
You know, and while we
would never cook these,
we can serve them up in style.
Russian style, that is.
Here we have some blini,
which are little yeasted pancakes,
topped with creme fraiche
and a nice little plop of caviar.
If I'm splurging on good caviar,
this is the only way I wanna eat it.
Simple, elegant, delicious.
I'm gonna pop one of these right here.
Hmm, amazing.
The tartness of the creme fraiche
is so nice with the
brininess of the caviar,
and the graininess of the blini
mellows out the intensity of the eggs
while also playing out
some of its nuttiness.
It doesn't get much
better than this, folks.
For our next egg, we're
gonna stay under the sea
but get a little bit weirder
with some lobster roe.
There are plenty of
egg-laying fish in the sea,
but we wanted to compare that
to the eggs from a
non-fish marine creature.
This black slimy stuff
here is lobster roe.
It's pretty gross-looking,
I've gotta be honest.
A lot of times, people
would discard this stuff
when they're cleaning a lobster.
But even though it's gnarly-looking,
it actually does taste good, I swear.
Let's cook this up.
So the interesting thing about lobster roe
is that it turns a bright
red when you cook it,
which is why it's also
known as lobster coral.
If you've ever opened up a steamed lobster
and found red stuff
inside, this is what it is.
It smells great, very aromatic.
Let's give it a little taste.
Hmm, it's really cool.
Big oceanic flavor, and
surprisingly not salty at all.
It tastes really lobstery,
like a concentrated lobster
stock or something like that.
And the texture is a little mealy,
but normally you wouldn't
eat it in this way.
It would usually be incorporated
into a sauce or something like that,
which is exactly what we're going to do.
Voila, so we here we
have some lobster tails
that we've steamed, halved.
And then what we've made is a
little bit of a lobster butter
out of the roe.
We've simply stirred some
of that green blackish stuff
into some hot drawn butter,
and it immediately turned red
and infused it with lobster flavor.
Lobster loves butter.
Hmm, so tasty.
It's actually pretty subtle,
but the lobster roe really intensifies
the natural flavor of the lobster meat,
really gilding the lily over here.
And this feels like a really restaurant-y
sort of preparation,
probably not the kind
of thing I'd do at home.
But a fancy and delicious
garnish nonetheless.
And last but not least,
we're gonna check out some
snail eggs.
Our final egg is neither fish nor fowl.
These are eggs from the
petit gris land snail.
The eggs are in between the size
of our salmon roe and our sturgeon caviar,
but they're bright white,
like little pearls.
They don't have a shell,
but they do have a sturdy outer membrane
which keeps them intact.
And they're salt-cured
just like the other caviar-style eggs.
This is pricey stuff.
It's difficult to harvest,
and a single snail only lays around
four grams of eggs per year.
The Romans called these
the pearls of Aphrodite
because they considered
them to be an aphrodisiac.
Well, we'll see about that.
Um, wow, so crazy.
The beads really roll around in your mouth
and they're almost hard to pop,
so much more than the
fish roes we've tried.
And the flavor is wild.
Really mushroomy with a distinct earthy,
wet moss forest floor sort of flavor.
Wow, I truly never tasted
anything like this in my life.
Okay, now we're gonna
try this out with some
escargot.
We're doubling down on the snail here
with buttery-cooked burgundy snails
topped with some of our snail caviar.
This smells incredible.
Some herbs and garlic going on in there.
I can't wait to try this one.
Hmm, really cool.
The eggs lend some really
interesting textural contrast
to that soft, tender snail meat.
The delicate flavor of the eggs
is getting lost a little bit here
because of the escargot
butter which is so strong.
And I'm definitely picking
up some of that woodsy,
earthy, mushroom-y quality.
Wow, what a treat.
And there you have it, folks.
12 types of eggs.
We tried all kinds of
bird eggs, fish eggs,
and even snail eggs,
and each was distinctly different
and delicious in its own way.
Have a favorite type of egg
you didn't see here today?
Let us know in the comments.
