Have you ever had your good ole’ Aunt Bessy snip at you for trying to use the wrong colored egg for your ancient, secret family recipe? She would swear up and down the Mississippi that she would rather eat dirt than use a white egg in her grandmother’s recipe. But why does she claim that brown eggs are so much better for this recipe than a white egg? What is the difference between the two?
Now, we can’t answer for good ole’ Aunt Bessy and your family recipes, but we can provide a more scientific and nutritional answer. Obviously, the first difference between a brown egg and a white egg is the color. This difference is due to the chicken that laid it. Usually brown eggs are slightly more expensive than white eggs, due to the size of a chicken that it. Chicken breeds that lay brown eggs usually are bigger than ones that lay white eggs. Sometimes price differs based on if the eggs have other adjectives after “large” and “brown”, for an example “organic”. To see more information about what these labels mean, visit our post here (https://ncegg.org/wp-content/uploads/Egg-terms-explained.pdf).
According to a study done by Consumer Reports, there is a minimal taste difference. However, this difference is not from the color of the egg shell, but it is actually due to the feed a chicken is fed. The same applies for nutrition. Ultimately, there is no nutritional difference between the contents of a brown egg and a white egg. Each egg has 70 calories, 4 to 5 grams of fat (differing on the feed again), 6 grams of protein, and 185 milligrams of cholesterol.
So, all this being said, what kind of eggs are you going to buy?
Trivia: You can tell what color egg will be laid just by looking at a chicken. If they have pigment in their earlobes–yes chickens have earlobes–they will lay a brown egg. If they have white earlobes, they will lay a white egg. This differs based on the breed of chicken.
