Why Your Brain Prefers Eggs With Orange Yolks
For years I've talked about my love for farm-fresh, free-range, local eggs. They're bursting with flavor. They're rich and creamy instead of thin and watery, like the supermarket variety. And the color of those yolks! Bright orange, a sign of the strength and virtue of the chickens that laid them.
Either that or the eggs are full of food coloring.
"If you want to serve your friends the best scrambled eggs they've ever had in their lives, scramble two or three drops of orange food coloring into them," says Serious Eats food science guru Kenji Lopez-Alt on this week's Sporkful podcast. "The more orange the eggs are, the better people think they taste. They think, 'This came from a chicken that was eating marigold leaves' or whatever."
Kenji knows. He did a test in which he mixed free-range and supermarket eggs and colored them all green, and people couldn't taste the difference.
His study of how yolk color affects taste perception is included his amazing new book, "The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science," a 1,000 page tome that's the only food science cookbook you'll ever need. (Kenji says his primary inspiration was Mr. Wizard.)
So is Kenji a horrible liar who deceives his friends into thinking he's a better chef than he is?
"It's not a lie to say that knowing a free-range egg is free-range makes it taste better, because it really does. You taste things as much with your brain as with your tongue or nose."
In other words, if you think something tastes better, it really does taste better, even if it doesn't taste better.
Listen to this week's episode of The Sporkful podcast for more food science revelations, as Sporkful listeners call in to play a game we call Stump Kenji.
Is there any truth to the idea that some foods increase virility? Why are some hard-boiled eggs so much easier to peel than others? And why are recipes with flour so variable? Kenji can tell you:
Also in this week's show, Kenji challenges some of my eating innovations, including my Inside-Out Pizza Fold. (I fold inside out so that the cheese and sauce land directly on my tongue, but Kenji argues that approach diminishes the crackling impact of great crust.)
And he tries to poke holes in my Cheeseburger with Cheese on the Bottom, which is featured in this episode of my Cooking Channel web series You're Eating It Wrong:
Before you object to this revolutionary burger technique, bear in mind that if you oppose the Cheeseburger With Cheese on the Bottom, you're opposing cheesy goodness. Is that really a position you're prepared to defend?
Previously from Sporkful: How to slice your bagel along a Mobius strip — and why.
