Yeah, I know it's a bit hyperbolic but high end milk and eggs seem like the Monster HDMI Cable of food goods.
Some cow breeds have a high milk fat content and if you drink that un-homegenized you can tell, but once the milk fat is normalized I can't tell a difference. I can tell a much bigger difference between vat and HT pasteurization.
Same with eggs, sure high omega three eggs have a yolk that is more orange but unless your doing a back to back comparison on a a very runny soft boil yolk you really can't tell a difference in flavor. If the egg is an ingredient the difference becomes completely undetectable.
I think these types of "steps" removed products like eggs and milk have a much narrower band of quality than people think.
These biologically manufactured products just don't seem to be as directly effected by inputs as the organisms themselves.
I was inspired to perfect my French omelette skills over the summer and went out of my way to slowly improve each ingredient.
* I can earnestly say Kerrygold (or Irish butter from ALDI) makes a real difference than regular butter.
* I can say that kosher salt does help as well.
* I found a difference with (fresh cracked) white pepper but I don't personally prefer it over black pepper.
But most surprising to me (and what confirms your thesis) is I did not find a difference with the freshest of local eggs. I purposely went directly to a local farm with their own chickens, but nope- still the same as mass market eggs.
I've tried every expensive egg that Sprouts and Whole Foods sells and the only ones I've found to be notably different are the Happy Egg Co. Heritage Breed Eggs specifically. Sprouts is the only place I know of locally that sells them. They're blue and brown, the shells are extremely thick, often have feathers stuck on them, and they're $8 a dozen (and have been all through the shortages and everything, the price has never gone up or down). The yolks are so dark especially in the summer it's astonishing.
Absolutely right on Kerrygold, in my experience. Nothing else I've bought has come close.
Fresh eggs make it easier to get the right texture, especially for new cooks (less albumin separation -- same reason fresh egg whites whip better). If you're already past the basics, freshness won't impact the result much outside of, perhaps, a bit of weepage.
Egg flavor is fairly resilient though. Even repeatable effects from, e.g., flaxseed in the diet, are pretty small. You might notice them, but in a french omelette the egg is a smooth base for delivering the actual food -- butter. I'd experiment there (very easy to make your own cultured butter at home) before playing with the flavor of eggs, and personally I basically ignore flavor when evaluating which eggs to buy.
For anyone else reading along, room temp eggs also make it much easier to get the right french omelette effect, especially without a nonstick pan. 5-10min in warm water if you refrigerate your eggs should suffice.
They absolutely do. There are cheats and hacks you can use to make decent-looking poached eggs regardless (molds, vinegar and salt in the poaching water, double-cooking with an intermediate ice bath, straining off the weaker outer proteins before cooking, ...), but fresh eggs give a more consistently good result.
I've only tried Kerrygold (which is Irish butter specifically) and the white label ALDI Irish Butter which is by all account I've read online...also Kerrygold.
I've never heard of "Normandy AOP butter", you'll have to enlighten me on that one.
Costco carries the New Zealand butter that's almost indistinguishable from Kerrygold. There are inevitably some flavor differences, but not when cooked and imo not in terms of quality.
That explain a lot, I didn’t totally care for the flavor. It was sold to me as “just for appearance” (no black specks in the final product) in most recipes but I didn’t see that reflected.
I buy "high end" eggs not because they're better for me, but because there were fewer or less toxic pesticides put into the environment to produce feed for it, and there's less chance the chicken spent its entire life in a cage so small it can barely move (or on the floor of a barn so packed that, again, it can barely move.)
That's the straw-man people who attack organic food buyers with. "You silly libtard, buying organics because you think it's better for you!"
Nope. It's only partially about my health. In the case of a lot of organic produce, it's more about my not wanting to support industry growers whose field workers are exposed to incredible levels of pesticides.
There are exceptions. Canadian grain for example, which farmers drench in pesticides using them as a drying agent to reduce spoilage rates. They take advantage of reduced regulations around pesticide residue that was pushed through by lobbyists hired by Canadian grain producers.
So, I will not buy any grain based products that aren't organic.
What is particularly scary: a producer who sells in bulk targeting the restaurant industry (Badia) was one of the higher levels tested.
Anything made with central/south american fruit puree? Organic only. Why? Producers used to spike the weight of their shipments with lead in the bottom of the containers. The lead would then go through the processing machinery. Result? Huge numbers of latino kids getting extreme lead poisoning.
I won't buy any central/south american produced candy period, because manufacturers like to print the labels with lead-containing inks among other problems, and they repeatedly test high for lead, have for decades, because those governments don't care or are being bribed: https://www.nmhealth.org/publication/view/help/2154/
Organic farming uses larger amounts of less effective poisons. Modern poisons are highly targeted and require smaller amounts. Typically they target disruption of metabolic pathways that are specific to plants.
"Organic" as a concept has fallen victim to regulatory capture.
If you douse your fields in copper compounds which aren't currently regulated as fungicides then you can keep your certification, no matter the quantity. Last I checked, ~80% of organic produce in the US had worse pesticide use than traditional farms (if you include things which aren't illegal yet, using rolling policy changes causing previous "organic" behaviors to be regulated as an indication of what the status quo is).
As a related concept, "GMOs" (selectively adding desired genes to a crop) can't be organic, but radiation and chems to increase the mutation rate 100,000x and then select the winning crops is organic.
I know you said health doesn't matter, but if you look at recent produce-induced health scares, the vast majority are e-coli from the fecal-oral route on your organic produce.
Not to mention, something like 3-8% of organic produce _still_ has the pesticides that are explicitly banned for use in organic farming. The same kind of people who spike a shipment weight with lead will also bribe an inspector and use pesticides. There's a lot of money sloshing around when you can charge twice as much for your crops.
That's not to say per se that you shouldn't buy organic food (when I'm purchasing from a large retailer, I do personally avoid it on principle, but that's a separate conversation), but don't let a particular buzzword short-circuit your critical thinking. You seem to be very aware of the kind of harm that can happen when you purchase products produced by megacorps in countries with low incomes and a culture of bribes. You, unfortunately, still need to apply that analysis to each product. The heuristic of "organic == good" doesn't apply in today's day and age.
> I also won't buy non-organic spices or teas. Turns out that a lot of non-organic spices - like cinnamon - have very high levels of lead, but the organic versions have much less, or none
This is hit or miss depending on the substance. E.g. organic chocolate has more lead than non-organic chocolate, on average.
The lead amount has more to do with the very specific place that a given crop is being grown, not so much to do with organic food or not.
If you use organic farming practices on top of soil that's got a lot of lead in it, the resulting food thing will have more lead in it
You should probably buy non-organic eggs if you want healthier eggs. Due to the regulations regarding what they can eat ("natural" food), they will eat more dioxines and heavy metals. Synthetically derived ingredients skip this issue because there is no bioaccumulation of contaminants.
