J. Kenji López-Alt has a bit in his Food Lab book where he explores the effect of yolk colour on taste. Paraphrasing, the takeaway is that people generally perceive redder/deeper yolks as more flavoursome, but if you remove this factor (with food colouring, say), then people can't tell the difference. He summarises this in a twitter thread: [1]
Some french tv channel did a quick game test, asking a bunch of students to sip colored soda and guess the flavour. Green was mint, Red was strawberry, Yellow was citrus, they were all strawberry. Surprising "reality".
I’ve always wondered if part of the reason the “clear” craze for sodas died off is that you didn’t have the right signals to tell you what it tastes like.
color is probably associated with certain flavors. For most people our eyesight is used to identify things more so then other senses. If you don't see the color you probably have to work slightly harder to identify what is being eaten. How many people have a tongue so accurate they can eat/drink food blindfolded and identify it?
A food scientist came to my high school and did a similar demonstration with us - except with different flavors of koolaid. Students reported red as cherry, purple as grape ... but they were actually the same flavor and only differed in color.
We did an experiment in class, where we drank sodas blindfolded. Not only did we fail to distinguish Coke Cola and Pepsi, we couldn't even tell sprite from coke!
I would have never believed that they taste so incredibly similar without the experiment.
My guess is that some common ingredients have such strong flavor that the other ingredients are covered. We could reliably distinguish between coke and Diet Coke though.
My mom refused to believe that I could taste the difference between caffeine-free Diet Coke and the normal Diet Coke. She was trying to get me to decaffeinate myself.
So, she made me take a blind taste test. I proved I was right and that I really could taste the difference, and she stopped trying to force me to decaffeinate myself.
She was quite surprised and unhappy that I was right and that I really could taste the difference. But to her credit, she upheld her end of the bargain.
It was a difference in flavor. At the time, I attributed it to the decaffeination process that was used, thus causing the drink to taste different. It was a mild difference, but detectable. And I didn't like the different taste.
Thinking back on it, it could just have been that the caffeinated drinks came from a newer batch and the decaffeinated drinks came from an older batch. Or maybe they were canned in different facilities, which might be using different water.
I don't think my mom controlled for all the potentially confounding variables.
But all of these experts on the internet say you can't even tell the difference between coffee and tea if you're blindfolded let alone different types of soda so clearly you're wrong! /s
Seriously, though, one unreplicated headline-grabbing result can generate so very much "science says..." type rhetoric.
The Sprite vs Coke thing is surprising; Coke vs Diet Coke is not. I regularly find that I'm given Diet Coke even though I asked for regular. Aspartame and most other artificial sweeteners have a very distinctive flavor and I can generally detect it even in items I don't expect to find it in.
I'm skeptical. Coca Cola and Pepsi have fairly distinct flavor profiles. There are some that I could see being more problematic. Like RC vs Pepsi, which have a similar profile. But Sprite? Nah, that's got a strong citrus component that definitely doesn't exist in a cola.
> But Sprite? Nah, that's got a strong citrus component that definitely doesn't exist in a cola.
It may surprise you to find out, then, that Coca-Cola is actually a lemon-lime soda. In fact, all Colas are predominantly citrus flavored.
"The primary modern flavoring ingredients in a cola drink are citrus oils (from orange, lime, and lemon peels), cinnamon, vanilla, and an acidic flavorant." [1]
Oh, they are probably indeed different. But the question wasn’t whether they were different; it was whether we could tell the difference in a blind folded test.
I'm sorry, but that just isn't true. No doubt some wines cross over, but the tannins present in much red wine are notable by their absence from pretty much all white wine.
For people into this kind of stuff check out “Taste: What You’re Missing” from food scientist Barb Stucky.
It’s a pop science collection of stores about measuring tastes and food pleasure. I remember reading a chapter on texture and how one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cram, Ben Chohen, doesn’t have a sense of taste. When you can’t taste anything food, ice cream in particular, becomes very boring after the first couple bites. So the sense of pleasure comes from different textures rather than different flavors. That’s why B&J’s ice cream has so many chunky ingredients.
Over here in the bay area some Japanese markets have "golden yolk" brand eggs that have deep orange colored yolks. I don't know if they're more nutritious / taste better but the texture is different. When frying these and regular store bought eggs in the same pan, they hold their shape better. The store bought eggs spreads out more and the egg white tears more easily.
> Over here in the bay area some Japanese markets have "golden yolk" brand eggs that have deep orange colored yolks. I don't know if they're more nutritious / taste better but the texture is different. When frying these and regular store bought eggs in the same pan, they hold their shape better. The store bought eggs spreads out more and the egg white tears more easily.
Your issues sound more like age than quality; I worked on small hobby farms with 10 hens and large scale farms with 1000s of laying hens and altered their feed to try and change the yolk colour. It's what you'd expect, actually, the more bugs and less processed food they ate (especially grass) the more gamey the eggs tasted. The more bread we fed them, with butters and additives, the lighter the yolks got.
We gave them kitchen scraps, and they visited the compost heaps for bugs and let them roam the gardens as a form of pest control; during the spring/summer they were learning to hunt down field mice and grasshoppers and the yolks got blood red as a result of this increase in protein. The egg shells were determined by breed, and quite consistently the same color as their ear areas [0].
Store bough eggs could be weeks old before they arrive to your kitchen, and even longer since most won't eat them right away, too.
In short, chicken breeds and their respective diets will be the main determinant of egg color and yolk respectively.
They are also pretty mean when in large groups to other hens, the term 'pecking order' is real in nature and more-so with hens who will bully an often feebler hen in order to establish dominance within the pack. Having a rooster sort of calms them down, but not in terms of hierarchy as they are hard-wired to asset dominance within their group. These things really do behave like little raptors, which is why I ate like a dozen eggs a day when I farmed. They ware also cannibals who will eat their own eggs for no apparent reason--they were all well fed and had plenty of other options for food.
Ah, yes, that would be something I would be excited about in an egg - egg yolks that don't break easily. Many in my family love their eggs fried as "bulls eye" / "sunny side up" ( https://simpleindianrecipes.com/Home/Fried-Egg.aspx ).
Incidentally, that pictures actually shows another difference I noticed between these and "store bought" eggs. The store bought eggs the egg white when fried tend to get bubbly, where as the "golden yolk" eggs they tend to stay smooth. I prefer smooth, as the bubbly white gives a weird texture.
EDIT: I don't mean bubbly as in fried crispy kind of bubbly, but just air filled but not crispy kind.
It's the same as the claims that no one knows they are sick for weeks before symptoms. If you're unhealthy and living with that, yeah, I guess you might not notice feeling off
> no one knows they are sick for weeks before symptoms
Weeks? Regular colds and flu have incubation periods of just a few days. Diseases with incubation periods measured in weeks tend to be the more serious ones that don't occur often enough (thankfully) to be used as a good comparison point.
I mean, you can definitely tell the difference between, say, a mass-produced egg and one from a naturally raised chicken. The latter often has more orange-y yolks. That being said, some large-scale producers add stuff to the diet to get more orange yolks and some naturally raised eggs aren't super orange so yes, colour alone doesn't mean much.
There's a legitimate reason what one might hold that impression, although I'm not sure to what degree it is at play. A home grown chook that gets a lot of its diet from foraging insects and eating various scraps probably will have a more flavorful, eggier egg and due to the carotenes in the diet the yolk will be redder.
Of course, you can get the same orange yolk from adding caroteens to the feed of an industrially grown layer's feed with none of the associated other differences
Reminds me of the studies which show that wine connoisseurs are describing the colour, not the taste, of the wine. I've always found this highly suspect because I guarantee anyone who drinks wine regularly could fairly accurately judge what price bracket a wine came from, at least within a factor of 2-3. You could mistake a $10 wine for a $15 wine or vice versa but a $50 wine is noticeably different.
That is not in line with the blind taste tests I have seen. The vast majority of people not only can't pick out the more expensive wine, they also tend to prefer the cheaper wines.
Even wine-likers would be able to tell, but the vast majority of people don't know much about any given niche, by definition. It's like saying "80% of people surveyed couldn't tell the difference between an AE86 and an AE85 just by driving them". Duh but the difference is there and not hard to spot if you know what you're looking for. We need to stop conflating general unfamiliarity with impossibility to distinguish.
I suggest you organise this with your friends - it is a lot of fun and you can enjoy an adult science experiment.
If you do want to try it, then two suggestions: 1. try to have some way to blind yourself from the results, 2. Make a decision whether you want everyone to get plastered or not.
I did this a few years ago and it was heaps of fun, but I wasn’t careful about amounts so we all got trolleyed by mistake.
I'm always down for this kind of science. We actually did a similar experiment with rum a while ago, I was of the opinion that spirits denatured a little after they'd been open a while and didn't taste as nice, others disagreed and so we did an experiment.
Two bottles of rum were bought and stored for several months, one unopened and one opened with a modest amount imbibed from it. Then a brand new one was bought as a control. For each round of testing, while the rest of us were out of the room we had a volunteer pour out and label a sample per bottle per tester and record the labels before randomizing their order. Each tester then tried each of their samples and wrote down which bottle we thought the sample had come from. Afterwards we cross referenced the guesses with the original samples.
The end results were inconclusive but indicated that there wasn't much if any difference. My new hypothesis is that the effect I observed was actually due to the coke I was using as a mixer getting stale but much more data is needed.
[1]: https://nitter.net/kenjilopezalt/status/1176542696724320256