Duck Egg アヒルの卵

While I was browsing Weee Asian grocery website, I noticed that in addition to the quail eggs which we like to get regularly, they also have duck eggs. I asked my wife if she had ever eaten a duck egg. She replied, “Have I ever eaten a duck egg?” Then reminded me that duck eggs were a regular by-product of raising ducks as a child in rural Pennsylvania even if the ducks were just pets. “So yes she had eaten a number of duck eggs in her past.” She also mentioned that, to her recollection, they were extremely rich with a rather strong/gamy flavor. In fact, to her juvenile palate they were almost inedible. (Her sister emphatically confirmed my wife’s description of the duck eggs).  Her family used to cook scrambled eggs in the ratio of one duck egg with several hens eggs to somewhat blunt the gaminess of the duck eggs. This peaked my interest and ordered half a dozen.

The picture below is a comparison of a hen’s egg (left) to a duck egg (right). Although we read that duck eggs can be as much as 50 to 100% larger than chicken eggs, in this particular example, the duck egg is only about 20-30% larger than the chicken egg. 

Upon cracking it open, the duck egg has a thicker and sturdier shell and the inner membrane appears stronger. The duck egg yolk (right) are larger and brighter orange in color. 

For a taste comparison, we decided to simply scramble the two eggs. This preparation would also be the closest to the tastes my wife experienced as a child. Since this was a lunch, I served slices of barbecued pork cooked our Weber, celery feta cheese with shiitake mushroom salad, “drunken” Campari tomato and a half slice of home-baked English muffin bread.

The scrambled duck egg has much brighter yellow in color (shown on the right). We tasted to compare. Based on my wife’s recollection, we were expecting the duck egg to be much stronger and gamier in flavor but it was quite similar to the hen’s egg. If we were not told, we would not have been able to tell the difference. My wife initially was hesitant to eat the duck egg fully expecting what she experienced as a child. Then she was very surprised and even a little disappointed at how similar it tasted to the chicken egg. (So she was left with a quandary. What had changed since her childhood—the duck egg or her palate?)

This was very interesting and we will try various preparations such as boiling, poaching or frying the duck eggs for comparison to the hen’s egg.