Around the World in Hard Boiled Eggs

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Hard boiled eggs have it rough. Their popularity waxes and wanes with the seasons and trends up or down at the whim of the latest hip restaurants. Eggs themselves are a year round staple for everything from omelets to cake batter. But hard boiled, eggs are the forgotten ingredient, that is until Easter comes around and you are left to wonder what exactly you are to do with those several dozen fully cooked eggs with jewel colored shells crowding the refrigerator.

From snack food to main course ingredient, hard boiled eggs are popular in many parts of the globe, every day of the year. I’ve done the hard work for you and scanned the cookbooks for ideas to get through the next week or two of meals without an egg salad sandwich in sight. And though options abound for repurposing our hard cooked egg friend, I’ve (pardon the pun) boiled it down to these seven ideas:

Turkish Breakfast: Hard cooked eggs are a typical feature of breakfast in Turkey served alongside olives, feta, marmalade, and fresh bread.

Pan Bagnat: A specialty of Nice, this is basically a salade nicoise on a sandwich. Layer oil packed tuna, blanched green beans, olives, good vinegar cured anchovies, and sliced hard boiled eggs on crusty white French bread.

Thit Kho Trung: I came across this recipe flipping through Pauline Nguyen’s book Secrets of the Red Lantern. Pork leg is cubed and simmered in caramel sauce with chilies and hard eggs until the meat is tender and the eggs take on the flavors of the broth.

Scotch Eggs: A classic British picnic and pub food, now trendy with certain hipster restaurants on this side of the pond, hard boiled eggs are covered in a sausage mixture, rolled in bread crumbs and deep fried.

Indian Egg Curry: It is probably no surprise that India, in a country with many vegetarians, found a way to infuse eggs with a load of flavor by simmering hard cooked eggs in a tomato sauce rich with fried onions, chilies, and spices.

Tea Eggs: A popular Chinese snack, hard boiled eggs are cracked all over but the shell is left on. The eggs are then simmered in a fragrant broth of soy, spices, and black tea. When the shell is removed the effect is a beautiful tea colored marbling on the once white egg. (Note: this is dish is best attempted with eggs not dyed.)

Empanadas: Hard boiled eggs are often used as a garnish in Peruvian cuisine. But for empanadas, Peruvians will sometimes add chopped boiled eggs along with olives or raisins to the traditional meat filling to give it a unique flavor.

Once you’ve made it through your current stock of hard boiled eggs, it might do well that to remember this is an ingredient that does not need a holiday. Hard boiled eggs have a home around the world, all times of day and days of the year. A month or so from now when egg fatigue has passed, take a look in the refrigerator, pull out the carton of eggs and boil up a few. A world of dinner inspiration is just a hard boiled egg away.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 medium onion
• 1 piece (1 inch size) fresh ginger
• OR
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/2 teaspoon garam masala
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 serrano chile
• 1 cup chopped canned tomatoes and their juices
• 1/2 cup half and half
• 1/2 cup chicken stock or water
• salt and pepper
• 4 hard-boiled eggs