alt Hacker News> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them
At 2 years old my son could blind taste test tell the difference between my neighbor's chicken's eggs and store bought eggs.
He refused to eat eggs (still doesn't) until we convinced him to try one of the eggs from our neighbor's chicken's. He liked that egg. Every time we've tried to pass (fancy!) store eggs off to him as our neighbor's eggs he's called us out for lying to him.
He'll reliably eat eggs from the chickens across the street and nowhere else.
So yes, there is a difference in taste!
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My 2 year old daughter never liked eggs. We started buying some from a neighbor who pasture raises his lay hens (and feeds them more chicken-appropriate feed).
She eats her eggs and asks for more. If we run out and I fry up some store bought ones, she refuses to eat them - even when I don't tell her where they're from.
Same goes for chicken meat from the grocery store vs. pasture raised broilers from another neighbor.
When it happened the first time it was something of a canary-in-the-coalmine situation for me.
People say that all the time, but professional cooks have run triangle tests on backyard/farm eggs vs. store bought eggs and people can't tell the difference. At this point, I don't believe there's a difference in taste. The psychological effects that would lead people to believe that difference exists --- a kind of culinary placebo effect --- are so strong that I just attribute everything to that.
I wonder how much of this is due to there simply being different types of chickens. I would guess that most commercial egg layers are from a specific or small subset of optimized chicken types. While there is a larger variety in the type of chickens people raise in their back yards. My brother has 3 different types of chickens and each lays visually different eggs.
I think you demonstrated that eggs taste different, but not better.
My 2 year old would only prefer to eat frozen chicken nuggets. That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.