I Was Going to Make Deviled Eggs, But...

(Photo by Marshall Astor from San Pedro, United States [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons )

So we had 2 dozen eggs sitting around for a week, so I thought, deviled eggs!  I looooove deviled eggs. 

So instead of boiling the eggs, I thought I'd try out baking them instead. I used Alton Brown's directions.  This turned out  to be, in the words of my people, "Not a good plan."

First off, the eggs were very difficult to peel. The whites stuck tight to the shell, leaving me with many not-perfect little white cases for the deviled eggs. Why oh why? I thought old eggs were easier to peel and almost guaranteed perfect little eggs. 

I turned to the internet. J. Kenji López-Alt , writing at Serious Eats' The Food Lab, explained The Hard Truth About Boiled Eggs: 

Slow-cooked egg whites bond more strongly with the membrane on the inside of an egg shell.

The next problem came when I sliced the eggs open. I had followed Alton Brown's directions, but I'd propped the eggs, wide-side-down,  in my silicone mini-bundt cake mold (the miffin tin was in use as a sorting device).  The egg yolks looked like this, only with the undercooked part at the bottom. Oh well, the undercooked yolks were solid enough; the evidence would disappear in the salad.

Although I have a Cuisinart  food processor, I diced* the eggs with a knife, and then diced enough celery to equal 3/4 of the volume of the eggs (by eyeball), added some diced red onion, a little diced red bell pepper, a bit of sweet relish, about a teaspoon of Blenditup Southwest Spice Blend, and some mayonnaise. Seriously the spice blend was the only thing I actually measured.  

 

I ate a bit right away -- in a cup, because I did not have any non-stale bread in the house. The texture was just right, but the flavor was a little bland. Oh well, the spice blend takes a little while to bloom, I know from using it before, so I set it to refrigerate over night. 

Oh, oops again. The next morning, when I went to make an egg salad sandwich, the egg salad was more like soup. If I had put it on bread, the bread would have turned into a soggy inedible mess in a femtosecond,  even with a mayonnaise layer on the bread. 

Or even this problem.

D'oh. Since I hadn't made egg salad in a while, I had forgotten that the crunchy bits tend to bleed lose water by the process of osmosis, because the saline concentration in the mayonnaise/spice blend mix is higher than that in the celery, onion, and bell pepper bits.  

So I stirred up the egg salad, and spooned it onto some romaine ribs, kind of folded them like a package, and ate with gusto. 

 

What are the take-aways?

1. If you want pretty peeled eggs, steam them according to this instructional from J. Kenji.
2. If you are going to make egg salad with crunchy vegetables to be served a day after preparation, figure out how to deal with the extra liquid that will be released by the crunch factor.

I may have some additional thoughts. Stand by.