WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: What's up with eggs?

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark. Mark is just learning how to walk again after breaking his leg. He's just starting to do stairs. So we've got one more episode with me before he gets back to the studio and joins me for all this cooking fun. But today I have got a one minute cooking tip. I'm going to talk all about eggs and what is going on in the world with eggs, and I'm going to tell you what's making me happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

My one minute cooking tip, My one minute cooking tip, bake your free form breads in a covered Dutch oven, not on a baking sheet. What do I mean by free form? Not the loaf bread you put in a loaf pan. I'm talking about a round loaf, a French boule, or even a braided round loaf, or a small braided oval, like a small challah. But you want to make sure that your Dutch oven is going to be big enough. to hold it. So here's what happens.

The Dutch oven is heated in your oven at 400 degrees for about an hour. So it gets super hot and you've made your dough. You've let it rise. You've shaped it. You let it rise again. Now, instead of baking it on a baking sheet, you put that risen loaf of dough Into that superheated Dutch oven immediately. It will spring up as it does in a professional oven and get significantly bigger than it would in a baking tray.

Second, it's a closed system because you put the lid back on it and that lid was in during the preheating. So the lid is hot. So we'll create some steam and that steamy environment delays the crust formation, allowing it to get. Even bigger. So try that and see if you like baking your bread in a covered Dutch oven.

before I get to the next segment of cooking with Bruce and Mark, I want to thank you for listening and ask you for your indulgence to please rate this podcast, wherever you get your podcasts from. Please give us a rating, leave a comment. We are not supported in any other way and your comments and your ratings are what do us the best good in this busy podcast landscape. So thank you for spending your time with us here and for leaving us a review Okay on to our next segment. What's up with eggs?

Eggs are all in the news, right? Everywhere you look, it's eggs. It's on social media. It's on the news. It's in the papers. Prices are through the roof. Last week I went shopping and almost all the eggshelves in my supermarket were empty. And what was there was 13 a dozen. That is kind of nuts. Now this week I went shopping and there were more eggs and prices had come down a little to about 20. And I know that that's a lot to pay for eggs, but why have the price of eggs been so high?

Well, it's because of outbreaks of a highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, and cases have significantly reduced the United States Egg laying flock, and that's causing a shortage of eggs, which is raising prices. But here's the thing. This bird flu has been out there since 2022. And that's why egg prices have been up and down for the past three years. This isn't something new. This has been coming in waves, right? And it's estimated that more than 136 million birds have been infected.

by the avian influenza in the last three years since 2022. In December, there were over 18 million birds affected. And in the U. S., when the flu is detected at a farm, sadly, the entire flock is culled. And that means that they are all destroyed. And then the farm is disinfected. And so what does this mean besides the lack of eggs in your supermarket and the prices going through the roof?

Well, more and more eggs, believe it or not, are being found at both our southern and northern border crossings. and being taken away from people yep, egg smuggling. But why isn't the bird flu and egg shortages a big problem in Canada? Well, there's a bunch of reasons why. Let's start with the fact that Canada has so many fewer people than the United States. 320 million people here in the U. S. It's hard to produce food for this many people without Giant industrial farms.

So in Canada, they have smaller farms and Canadian poultry farms are not only smaller, but it means if an outbreak occurs, it affects a smaller number of birds and limits the potential economic impact. Also, the farms are spread out. There's so much land in Canada versus how many people that the geographical distribution of these farms really helps prevent. the rapid transmission between flocks.

So you're not going to get a farm in one place getting bird flu and then the farm, you know, half a mile down the road getting it. They're really spread out. Also Canada has strict. regulations. And Canadian authorities implement strict biosecurity measures to monitor and control potential outbreaks on farms. And also, their culling practices are different. Well, here, we might have to wipe out an entire farm with millions of birds.

If avian flu is detected on an egg laying farm in Canada, Canada, sometimes the infected birds can be culled without the entire flock coming out and that helps prevent further spread and monitoring and surveillance. Canadian public health agencies closely monitor avian flu both domestically and globally and that's something we're just not quite doing as much in this country. So that's why People are trying to smuggle eggs in from Canada.

Now, one of the benefits of living rurally, and Mark and I live very rurally in New England, is that we can go to local farms and local backyard farmers who have chickens and they have eggs out in coolers on their front porches and at the ends of their driveways. And there's been a bit of an egg war recently. In our area and in our town and eggs were 5 a dozen from these local farms and some of them organic. And all of a sudden I've been seeing people crossing out the five and putting 4 a dozen.

Everybody is trying to beat out their neighbors and getting my money for their eggs. And it's really kind of fun because you could see the chickens. They're running around one of the farms near us. All she has are Guinea fowl, which are. In French, pintade. And they run around the roads, and luckily I've never seen any hit by cars on the roads. People are very careful. And those eggs are delicious, and they're beautiful, and they're 5 a dozen. So I've been stocking up on those kind of eggs.

There's a lot of weird news going on about eggs. there's a butcher in Bed Stuy in Brooklyn, Prince Abu's Butchery, and two weeks ago they handed out 200 dozen eggs to New Yorkers Free. And their feeling is eggs are a staple. Everybody needs them. And they wanted to make sure that people in their neighborhood were still able to get eggs. New Yorkers lined up for their free eggs.

And, also, in New York, go into any of the thousands of bodegas in New York City, and let me tell you, there are thousands. And you will find many selling eggs in packages of three. Little, three little eggs for three dollars. That's one dollar an egg, which is about twelve dollars a dozen, which is about what they're costing in the supermarkets up here, but this is nice, so you only have to buy three eggs. You don't have to buy a whole dozen.

And people are not only smuggling eggs, people are stealing eggs. Last month there was the theft of one 100, 000 eggs of Pete and Jerry's organic eggs in Pennsylvania and they were stolen from one single store chain and it is insane a hundred thousand eggs So what's happening about this? Well to mitigate the shortage Turkey, the country of Turkey, they have begun exporting approximately 33 million pounds of eggs to the U. S. to help.

This is part of a preliminary agreement between our countries and it will continue through July of 2025. So some of those eggs you may be getting at your store are actually from the country of Turkey. And while I'm talking about eggs, how about some fun egg facts for the day? about eggs, how about some fun egg facts Did you know that an eggshell can have As many as 17, 000 pores, yep, eggshells are porous.

And when the chicken lays the egg, they're coated in a protective layer that sort of seals those. In many parts of the world, a lot in Europe and Asia, they do not wash the eggs before they sell them, so eggs can be kept at room temperature. In the U. S., eggs are washed, so because they're porous and that Protective layer's been washed off. We have to keep them in the fridge. And did you know that an egg shell and an egg yolk color have no effect on the taste or the quality of an egg?

Nope. That's just about what the chicken was eating and the breed determines the egg color. Some are brown, some are white, some lay blue eggs, green eggs, even pink eggs. However, chickens that lay brown eggs tend to require more feed to produce their eggs, so that's why brown eggs sometimes are a little bit more expensive than white eggs. And did you know it takes a chicken 24 to 26 hours to produce an egg? Which is why, in the height of laying season, a chicken can produce an egg a day.

And, although ostrich eggs are one of the largest bird eggs known to us, Kiwis, a much smaller bird, lays the largest egg in relation to its body size of any species of bird. And when it comes to the number of eggs laid each year, Iowa leads the nation with almost 15 billion eggs produced annually. Ohio, a close second, with 8 billion eggs a year. And Finally, about eggs. This has been an internet favorite for the past few weeks, and this is cracking me up.

You scroll through TikTok and Reels and Facebook and Instagram, and you see this headline, Scientists Find the Perfect Way to Boil an Egg. Now, maybe you haven't seen that. Google it if you haven't, but I see it in my feed. And the truth is, to make a really good hard boiled egg is difficult. Why is that? Because the yolk and the white cook at separate temperatures. 65 degrees centigrade or 150 Fahrenheit is the most perfect texture for an egg yolk.

185 Fahrenheit, that's 85 centigrade, is the most perfect temperature for an egg white. Boil an Egg and You end up getting a slightly overcooked white or a slightly undercooked yolk. So, here's what happened. An Italian scientist and his team figured it out. They used math and the knowledge they gained from working with them. Plastic foams. Yeah, you heard me. Plastic foams to invent something they're referring to as periodic cooking.

Periodic cooking has you flip the egg between boiling water and room temperature water, about 85 degrees Fahrenheit or 30 Celsius, every two minutes. And you keep doing that for a total of 32 minutes. Now with this rapidly shifting temperature you end up with this incredibly beautiful boiled egg. Now do you want to spend 32 minutes boiling an egg? I don't know, that's up to you.

What I usually do is I put an egg in boiling water for minutes, I turn off the heat, I set the pan aside, and I let it sit for another four minutes. That, to me, gives me a perfectly set white, the yolk is slightly jammy in the middle, and I absolutely love a boiled egg done that way. In fact, that is just about the only way I will eat a boiled egg when the yolk is a little jammy. Once it's cooked all the way, it's not my favorite, so I am not a fan of your egg salad or of your deviled eggs.

My husband is though, and I make them for him all the time.

Our last segment of the podcast, what's making me happy in food this week? Believe it or not, decaffeinated coffee from Chiapas, Mexico. A few months ago, I decided to give up caffeine and I thought it was going to be really hard, but surprisingly, I didn't go through any of the headaches or any of the nervousness that people claim. I'm a little tired and it gets harder to wake up in the morning, but I have found this amazing Swiss water process decaffeinated coffee from Southern Mexico that is.

is just fabulous. It's a dark roast. I do it in my espresso machine. I have a latte with that every morning, sometimes in the afternoon too, because for me coffee is not about waking up. It's about the flavor. I just love coffee. So what's making me happy is a beautiful Decaffeinated Mexican coffee from the south of Mexico. And if you want to try it, go ahead. Tell me what you think about decaffeinated coffee from Mexico. So, that's our podcast. We talked about baking bread in a Dutch oven.

I talked endlessly about eggs and what's going on with eggs. And I talked about decaffeinated coffee. Please go to our Facebook group Cooking with Bruce and Mark and tell me what and tell us what's making you happy in food this week. We tell you every week what's making us happy. We want to know what's making you happy in food this week and we might even try it or certainly talk about it here on the next episode of Cooking with Bruce and Mark.