Classic Southern Deviled Eggs

Name: Classic Southern Deviled Eggs
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 35 min
Ingredients: 6 large eggs; 3 tablespoons mayonnaise; 1 1/2 teaspoons yellow mustard; 2 dashes vinegar-based hot sauce; 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder; 1 1/2 tablespoons pickle relish (sweet or dill); salt; pepper; paprika (optional)

March 27, 2018

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I just love deviled eggs, but for whatever reason, I don’t make them very often. But when Easter rolls around, it’s always the perfect way to use up those leftover colorful eggs.

You know, recipes like this are funny because everyone has their own way of making them. Oddly enough, every recipe I’ve seen and all the eggs I’ve seen that other that other people have made have paprika on them as a garnish, but I never once saw my mom make deviled eggs with paprika. Not once.

Now, I always say that the way your mama did it was the right way, so I’m showing them both ways here – some with paprika and some without.

The other thing I like in mine that’s a little different is that I prefer dill relish to the much more popular sweet relish. This recipe works with both, but I’ve just never been a huge fan of sweet relish. In fact, when I was a kid, mom would make potato salad for me separately and chop up dill pickles in it rather than sweet ones like everyone else’s. Wasn’t she sweet to do that?

I see all these pretty photos where folks have piped their filling into their eggs so daintily. I never once saw my mom do that either. She just spooned it into the white. If you’ve got the time and energy and want to make them look special, you just go on with ya bad self. I’ll be over here spooning it into mine because I’m just ready to eat. 🙂

The other thing worth mentioning is how to get these eggs cooked. Boiling them is the traditional method, but I’m gonna flip that theory on its ear for a minute.

The big hassle for me when making hard cooked eggs is peeling them. Now, I’ve seen (and tried) all the tips and tricks to try to make them easier to peel – using older eggs, adding vinegar to the water, add baking soda to the water, starting with cold water in the pot, etc., etc. For me, none of those work consistently. But you know what does? Cooking the eggs in an electric pressure cooker. While they’re virtually the same thing, I’ve had an electric pressure cooker for years before folks knew anything about an Instant Pot. Pressure cooking the eggs on low pressure for about 8 minutes with a manual pressure release will deliver perfect hard cooked eggs every time and the shell will peel right off. Now, why does this work? Well, the theory is that the steam causes the membrane inside the egg to pull away from the shell making them easier to peel. And that makes sense.

But realizing that not everyone has an electric pressure cooker, I found this egg steaming recipe from my friend Elise Bauer over at Simply Recipes. She confirmed that steaming them is the reason they peel so easily. Testing it myself yielded virtually the same results as the pressure cooker method.

SO! I wrote this recipe to include the method of steaming the eggs. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you. Feel free to click that link to follow Elise’s recipe as she has much more detail in her instructions. Enjoy!