Easy Egg Salad

There’s nothing more enjoyable for lunch on a warm summer day than a cold egg salad sandwich. As long as you keep your egg salad mixture refrigerated prior to use, you can safely make and eat egg salad sandwiches regardless of the weather. Egg salad can also be enjoyed as a topper on green leafy salads, or is especially nice as a side to a tomato salad, complete with buttered whole-wheat toast.

There are many excellent egg salad recipes to be found in cookbooks and on the Internet. However, the key to a tasty egg salad starts well before starting the recipe. To produce an excellent result you need to pay attention to how you boil your eggs. An egg that has been cooked correctly has a soft, tender texture. An over-boiled egg is rubbery and has a harder texture, and is more difficult to mash. If you boil your eggs with the following technique, you will enjoy an egg salad that has a smooth, even texture and taste.

First: you shouldn’t use the very best-dated eggs you can find at the grocery store for any recipe calling for boiled eggs you must peel. If you use new eggs, you may have already noticed that they are much harder to peel than those that are about a week or two old. Researchers are not exactly sure why older eggs are easier to peel, but most believe it is due to a gas building up between the shell and the thin white membrane of the egg. This build-up pushes the shell of the egg away from the inner membrane and makes the shell peel off easier after the egg has cooled.

Second: have you ever boiled your eggs and found after you peeled them that there was a green-brownish layer around the egg yolk? This occurs because of a natural chemical reaction between iron in the egg yolk with sulphur in the egg white. You can minimize this green layer by rapidly cooling your eggs after initial boiling. Here is a brief outline of the cooking technique: place your eggs in a pot large enough to comfortably make one layer of eggs and fill with water to one inch over the top of the eggs. Bring the pot to a boil then take the pot off of the hot burner and let the pot sit with the eggs for 20 minutes to finish cooking the eggs. Then, immediately take the eggs out of the hot water and place in a bowl of ice water to cool off. This rapid cooling will prevent little (if any) greenish icky stuff to form, resulting in a nicer colour and flavour for your egg salad filling!

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If you are interested in a step-by-step guide for making some delicious and unique egg salad recipes, visit Irene’s Egg Salad website (www.eggsaladgourmet.com).  At this site, you can see the whole process a step at a time and download our free recipe booklet. You will become an egg salad expert in no time at all!