Only in Japan can you find strange foods like garlic flavored cola, deep-fried maple leaves, and delicious water cake, but citrus-scented eggs are pretty strange, even by its standards. And yet these fruit-smelling eggs do exist thanks to a producer in Kochi Prefecture, in the southwest corner of Shikoku island.
The special eggs, called ‘yuzu tama’, supposedly smell and taste like yuzu – one of Japan’s most loved citrus fruits. A yuzu looks like a wrinkly cross between a lemon and an orange and tastes like a combination of grapefruit and mandarin. It grows in abundance in Kochi and is used widely in Japanese cuisine.
Surprisingly, the yuzu tama don’t contain any chemical additives or flavorings. They are produced merely by feeding chickens copious amounts of yuzu peel, along with kale, non-GMO corn and sesame seeds. The resultant eggs don’t look very different from regular eggs, but they supposedly smell tantalizingly citrusy, even before they’re cracked open.
