Beiruting News

If you love eggs and love fruit, you might want to think about moving to Japan.

The yuzutama egg looks just like a normal egg, but smells and tastes like the yuzu citrus fruit, RocketNews24 reported.

Essentially the lovechild of a lemon and mandarin orange, yuzu is a popular fruit in Japanese cuisine and often appears as lemon substitute in desserts. It has an intensely floral aroma and a taste that is similar to orange blossom water with a sharp grapefruit note. It has recently become well-known in the Western world, with Waitrose, for example, now offering the bottled juice.

The yuzutama eggs are made at Yamasaki Farms, in the southwest corner of the Japanese island of Shikoku.

The chickens are fed a diet of yuzu peel, kale, sesame seeds and corn. The yuzu peel in their diet apparently changes the aroma and flavour of the eggs the chickens lay.

On their website, Yamasaki Farms write "Greatly reducing the distinctive fishy smell in eggs, we have succeeded in clothing them in a refreshing citrus scent. They taste sweet and full bodied, and the smell stirs the appetite."

The eggs can be served in any way, though the farm recommends eating it in a tamago kake gohan (cooked rice and raw egg) dish.

Tasting the egg, a writer from RocketNews24 said: "When you chew, there's this invigorating wave of yuzu aroma coupled with a refreshing citrus taste that spreads through your mouth. I've never had an egg like this before."