Helen, Help Me: Should I Be Cooking with Ostrich Eggs?

Bird flu has made buying chicken eggs so unpredictable! Prices are high, and then they’re lower again; grocery-store shelves are bare, but only sometimes! Are there eggs from other birds that you’d recommend? I’ve heard that a single ostrich egg is big enough to make an omelette for a whole family. —Anonymous, N.Y.C.

Eight years ago, in the dreamy days when hen eggs cost pennies and everyone was happy all the time, I entered a fugue state and bought an emu egg for twenty-five dollars at a Brooklyn Whole Foods. It was a few days before Thanksgiving dinner, which I would be hosting at my apartment for a dozen and a half assorted relatives, and I was in a near-manic state of prep shopping, fridge organization, and oven-sequencing strategy. The emu egg—a two pound, eight-inch ovoid with a sultry teal shell gently speckled in pale green—seemed like just the right absurdist final flourish for an already insane endeavor. A single emu egg has the volume of approximately a dozen of its chicken-born analogues: should I make an enormous pound cake? A gallon of hollandaise? A deviled egg as big as the Ritz? In the end, simplicity prevailed when one of my cousins sensibly suggested that we hold on to the egg for brunch the day after Thanksgiving. Hard-boiled and sliced, the egg would be the ideal size for a bagel topping—breakfast sandwiches made slightly jurassic.

Cooking the emu egg was a fun little gimmick that I might never do again. Did you know that it takes about an hour and a half to hard-boil an emu egg? Did you know that, when hard-boiled, the yolk is a chartreuse-tinged chalky white? That the albumen, subjected to the same cooking method, is not opaque white but has a sort of snowy, snotlike translucence? I know these things now. It tasted fine, once we all got past the uncanny-valley horror of something that was, and yet was not, just a very, very large normal egg.

I tell this story not to put you off considering the possibility of alternative eggs but to illustrate that egginess is not a universally fungible quality, and the eggs of other bird species differ in ways beyond volume. I did occasionally wonder if things would have turned out more thrillingly with the emu egg if I’d been more ambitious and gone for something like a soft scramble with cream and chives, or a dramatically tonsured soft boil—with a cereal bowl as an egg cup, and an entire battalion of toast soldiers. Not long ago, motivated by nostalgia and a desire for emotional redress—and, speaking to your question, a desire to reduce my reliance on the beleaguered chicken egg—I actually looked up the price of emu eggs and was shocked to learn that they’ve been tipping past sixty bucks apiece! Indeed, egg prices have risen across the class Aves as a result of inflation. So I wouldn’t recommend buying alternative eggs as any sort of practical measure—especially now that chicken-egg prices seem to be coming down. But just for the hell of it? Definitely.

Right now, we’re reaching the end of emu laying season, but the emu’s cousin, the ostrich, tends to lay at the warmer end of spring and through the summer. Ostrich eggs are about twice the volume of an emu egg, and have a white shell; you can buy one online right now at prices ranging from fifty dollars to $299.99. Truthfully, though, I think there’s just as much drama, and a whole lot more fun, to be found in scaling down. Itsy-bitsy quail eggs are cute as all getout, with brown-speckled shells. Each is about a third the volume of a chicken egg. Unlike the eggs of their behemothic brethren, quail eggs are in pretty steady demand by restaurants and other high-end institutions, so they’re relatively easy to find. A surprising proportion of New York grocery stores tends to carry them—and not just the fancy-pants markets! They’ve got them at my local!—shelved right next to the chicken eggs in clear plastic cartons of eighteen, generally priced around five dollars. Here, again, the best move is not to fold the eggs into cake batter or whip them into a meringue. (Can you imagine the tedium of separating out all those tiny yolks?) You want to serve them in a way that emphasizes their silly, marvellous little-ness. I love to boil quail eggs—cook them for about three minutes, then shock them in ice water to halt the cooking process, which makes them easier to peel and preserves the tenderness of the yolk. Serve them simply sliced in half lengthwise, a million of them on a plate—an Argos of yellow eyes—with a bit of salt and hot sauce on the side.

I’m also fond of duck eggs and goose eggs: these are miracles of flavorful, fatty yolks, easily findable at Asian supermarkets. Cook and eat them just as you would a chicken egg, though depending on the recipe you’re undertaking, you might find that the flavor is a little rounder, the color a little richer. The yolks are both larger and fattier than those of chicken eggs, making them a dream for baking (akin to using higher-butterfat European butter rather than standard American stuff). The yolks also make for magnificent, lusty, sunshine-yellow pasta; if you want to try it out before you put in the work yourself, swing by Maxi’s on Mott Street, an unbeatable Hong Kong-style restaurant that tends to draw major crowds around lunchtime, and get a bowl of the duck-egg noodles in a rich pork-bone broth. ♦