The Secret to Better Egg Salad? Grill Your Eggs.

There is no limit to what you can do with eggs. As we’ve learned this year already, freezing your eggs (!!) makes for great fried eggs, Julia Child’s perfect French omelette only takes 14 seconds, and don’t even get me started on the awe-inspiring tornado omelette. Now Steven Raichlen, the author of the Barbecue Bible series and the host of Project Smoke and Project Fire shows on PBS, has a recommendation for you: grill your eggs.

“Deviled eggs just got better,” he said in a video posted to Instagram this week. “So did egg salad.” The video shows three lightly tanned eggs sweating it out on a hot grill but doesn’t give much more information on what to do with them. Luckily, Raichlen’s prolific writing means specific instructions are easily tracked down. In a 2015 article for HuffPost, he explains that you can simply set the raw egg, still in its shell, on the grate over gentle fire. Then you just turn it with your tongs as it grills, for three to four minutes per side, until it finishes cooking. “It’s sort of like hard-boiling,” he explains. “But without the water.”

Once the eggs are finished cooking, you can use them in any way you might normally use a hard-boiled egg. He suggests barbecue sides, but it could also work in a grilled version of salade Niçoise (grill the tuna, grill the eggs, grill the veg), or save one or two for a grilled pork and grilled eggs version of ramen. 

To really go hard on dressing up the eggs, Raichlen has more tips: “Anyone have any HB eggs leftover from Easter? I have 2 words for you: smoke and devil.” Again, the post doesn’t offer much information, but the old HuffPost piece does: after you’ve hard boiled (or, one supposes, grilled) the eggs, peeled them, and chilled them, you put them in a 225 degree smoker until “smoke-scented and golden brown,” about 10-15 minutes.