Easy Deviled Eggs

Are you looking for a delicious recipe to prepare at your next gathering with family or friends? Deviled eggs are always a popular choice, but many cooks skip making them, feeling unsure of the steps required to achieve a successful result. There’s nothing worse than boiling a dozen new eggs and realizing you can’t remove the shell without getting half the white out of the egg. That’s when you stop making deviled eggs for the day and try to save the eggs by making an egg salad instead!

However, you’ll be pleased to know that making deviled eggs doesn’t have to be difficult. A few simple tips can make the whole experience easy and fun.

First, you should never use the freshest eggs for a deviled egg recipe. Because? This is because new eggs are much more difficult to shell than ones that have aged for at least a week, preferably two weeks. No one is exactly sure why old eggs are easier to peel than new ones, but most researchers believe it is due to the buildup of a layer of gas between the shell and the egg membrane. This helps the egg membrane to release more easily from the cooked egg white.

Second, have you ever boiled your eggs only to find after peeling them that there was a greenish-brown coating around the yolk? This occurs due to a natural chemical reaction between the iron in the egg yolk and the sulfur in the egg white. You can minimize this green coating by rapidly cooling the eggs after the initial boil. Here’s a quick rundown of the cooking technique: Place the eggs in a pot large enough to comfortably make a layer of eggs, and fill with water to within an inch of the top of the eggs. Bring the pot to a boil, then remove the pot from the hot burner and let it sit with the eggs for 20 minutes to finish cooking the eggs. Then, immediately remove the eggs from the hot water and place them in a bowl of ice water to cool. This rapid cooling will prevent little (if any) icky greenish things from forming, resulting in better color and flavor for your deviled egg filling!

A third tip: Add mayonnaise as the last ingredient when making deviled egg fillings, and only a tablespoon at a time, or just a half tablespoon at a time for smaller recipes. A typical complaint I’ve heard from people trying a new deviled egg recipe is that the egg filling ends up too runny or too thick. Too thick is easy to fix by adding a bit more mayonnaise, but once you’ve made the filling too runny, it gets a bit more challenging! If you add your mayonnaise a little at a time, rather than all at once, you’ll have better control over the final thickness of the filling. You want the filling to be thick enough to stand on and not run over the edges of the eggs when hungry hands pick them up!