Originally Posted by
MareLuce
By "chemical eggs" I mean anything other than a real cracked egg.
ex: "Carton Eggs" = a liquid poured from a carton that hopefully contains some real eggs but probably watered down and definitely with added "natural flavors" and other chemicals. Carton eggs make me quiver for some reason. And definitely are not delicious.
ex: What was served in the KLM Crown Lounge in Amsterdam yesterday morning. I simply wanted 1 real fried egg. Instead, they offered a steaming rectangular vessel of solidified 'scrambled' chemical eggs.
ex:
McDonalds Egg McMuffin is served with a real egg by default.
McDonalds Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit is served with a "Folded Egg" / eggs poured from a carton by default. See the difference in the menu pics?
Ordering hack: You can request any McDonalds breakfast item to be made with a "round egg" substituted for a "folded egg".
That is the simplest, most easily understood way to request a real cracked egg, not a chemical egg.
Technically, real cracked eggs which have any flavoring material (including salt) added to them would also be chemical eggs!
And often those solidified eggs you see are simply real eggs which have been powdered, and later reconstituted with water, and then dried simply by being heated. How is that really more "chemical" than adding flavoring ingredients to cracked eggs?
Powdered eggs, or powdered milk, both of which have to be reconstituted with water, are often disgusting, but they're simply the real product
over-processed in a disgusting way. They're over-processed that way because it's makes them much cheaper to transport when you're not paying for the weigh of the water component.
So I think a better term would be "over-processed eggs" rather than "chemical eggs". (Liquid eggs are perhaps less processed in some ways the powdered eggs, but perhaps more processed in other ways.)
Of course, every individual may have a slightly different diving line for "over-processed", but that's ok.
Holiday Inn Express, for example, used to use powdered "scrambled" eggs, and then a few years ago they started replacing them with frozen-then-reheated mini-omelets. While those are not quite the same as anything made with fresh eggs, to many people they're tons closer to real eggs than to powdered "scrambled" eggs. Freezing and then reheating is much less "destructive" processing for many foods than powdering and then re-constituting the powder with water. So I wouldn't necessarily call frozen-then-reheated real egg products "over-processed", even though are of course processed to some degree.
And, of course, hard-boiled eggs that are peeled and put in the fridge (or served still in the shell that you have to peel yourself) are about as real as eggs can get, and yet you can get them at many free-for-guests hotel breakfast buffets including Hampton Inn (though I'm not sure at how many airport lounges or airport restaurants). At such hotel breakfast buffets, I always choose hard-boiled eggs over cooked over-processed eggs (and those are often the only two egg choices).