Adventures In The Devil’s Egg

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The last time I asked my mother to refresh my memory on the details of her deviled eggs recipe, she told me eggs, mayo, salt, pepper, and ground dry mustard.  Then she reminded me that her recipe was straight out of the Betty Crocker cookbook.  I checked my own Betty Crocker cookbook, and sure enough, there it was.

But I got to playing around with it and I realized that there’s a very easy way to make a variety of flavorful deviled eggs:  add cream-based salad dressing.  So I hopped off to the grocery store and poked around the options of the refrigerated salad dressings, opting to bring home ranch and Caesar dressing.

First, hard boil the eggs.  I have my old egg cooker for this chore, although I confess, mine now leaks a little bit of water while in use, so I am eyeing a nicer one on Amazon.  Then let the eggs cool completely.  As life would have it, I ended up having to leave my hard boiled eggs in the fridge for several days before I turned them into deviled eggs. This worked in my favor, as they were very easy to peel after having been left to sit for awhile.

Then I cut each of the eggs in half and scooped out the yolks into a bowl.  For the purposes of this blog post, I did 3 eggs with ranch dressing and 3 eggs with Caesar dressing.  So, two separate bowls.  I added a little dressing (maybe a tablespoon) and started mashing with a fork.  Then I added more dressing until I liked the consistency.  Then I tasted and added salt a pinch at a time until it seemed perfect.  At this point, I scooped the mashed (deviled!) yolk into a small ziplock bag, sealed the bag, and cut the corner off so I could sort of pipe the yolks back into the whites.  But before I did any piping, I took a pinch of salt (a small pinch) and sprinkled it over each egg white half.  Then I piped the yolks back in.  This would look much more attractive if you used a pastry bag and a fluted piping tip, but I honestly couldn’t be bothered, not even for a pretty picture for the blog.

Once I’d made my two different flavors of filling and piped it into the egg whites, I needed some way to know which flavor was which.  This is only necessary if you are serving more than one flavor on the same plate.  Or if you want to decorate the tops a little.  For the ranch dressing, I sprinkled just a few bits of chive over the top.  I had a harder time figuring out what to top the Caesar flavor with.  My mom suggested a crouton.  While I love croutons, I didn’t think they’d look nice on top of deviled eggs and also I thought they’d get soggy if they sat for any length of time at all.  So I ended up sprinkling a tiny bit of grated Parmesan cheese on those.  I’m sure someone smarter than I can think of a better way, but that’s what I came up with.

Et voila!  They don’t look very pretty, because I didn’t take any care to make them so, but I can tell you that they are absolutely delicious.  And while I haven’t tried it, I’m pretty sure you could adapt this method to make egg salad as well. Eggs + salad dressing = deviled eggs or egg salad. Why not?

Oh, one final tip from my smart mother:  If you are going to serve these at some public event, it’s best not to assemble them until right before you are going to present them.  You can do all the work except piping the yolks back into the whites and topping them…do that just before serving, if you can.  Enjoy!