Upgrade Your Deviled Eggs With The Briny Flavors Of A Dirty Martini
There are lots of potluck dishes out there, but there's no easier crowd-pleaser than a tray of homemade deviled eggs. They take almost no skill at all. In fact, if you can manage to hard-boil eggs, you have all the cooking skills you need to be the belle of the next backyard barbecue. Deviled eggs are also a blank slate for all kinds of flavors. If you start with a classic recipe, one with mayonnaise, mustard, salt, pepper, and paprika, you have the base for making some very interesting eggs. Any flavor that works with mayonnaise will work with deviled eggs, including olives and olive juice. And what better way is there to use olive juice than in a dirty martini? Take a cue from your favorite classic cocktail to make a grown-up deviled egg that is as chic as a little black dress.
If you're a dirty martini fan, all you need to bring a batch of dirty martini deviled eggs to life are some boiled eggs and the classic deviling ingredients, plus some good-quality gin, a few fresh herbs, Worcestershire sauce, shallots, and of course, some cocktail olives and onions.
Make your yolk mix
If you've never made deviled eggs before, the basic procedure of any recipe is to cut boiled eggs in half lengthwise, scoop out the yolks, mix them with flavoring ingredients, and then scoop them back into the egg whites. From there, the sky's the limit when it comes to what you can add to make unique deviled eggs — everything from bacon, pickle juice, and sriracha, to avocado, and more. Pretty much anything pickled tastes good with salty, fatty mayonnaise, so cocktail garnishes like olives and onions are fair game.
If you want to make a batch of dirty martini deviled eggs, start by boiling six eggs for about 12 minutes, chill them down in an ice bath in the sink, and then peel away the shells. Slice your eggs on their axis and scoop out the yolks. Mix the yolks up with a few tablespoons of mayonnaise, a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, a few dashes of Worcestershire, diced shallot, cocktail onions (a small food processor or chopper works great for this since the onions are tiny), and a tablespoon or so of the brine from a jar of cocktail olives or onions. Mash everything together and then season to taste with salt and pepper. While you're mashing everything up, let your egg halves soak face down in a shallow pan with a little bit of gin to get that extra pop of cocktail flavor.
Garnish and serve
Once you have your yolks ready and the whites are tasting of juniper, flip the whites back over and either scoop the yolk mixture back into the egg whites with two spoons or cut the corner off a zipper-style bag and use it like a piping bag to squirt the mixture evenly amongst the eggs.
To garnish, you can soak some cocktail olives and onions in a little bit of gin and then pop them on top of each egg. Classic Manzanilla olives and cocktail onions are small, so you can use a whole one for each egg, or use one of each. Consider also using some specialty cocktail olives that are stuffed with blue cheese, feta, or hot peppers for a little something extra. Stuffed olives tend to be pretty big, so only use half an olive for garnishing each egg.
If you want a garnish with a little more flavor complexity, you can also make a mixture of chopped cocktail olives and onions, fresh parsley, and a little lemon zest mixed with a few tablespoons of gin and carefully spoon that on top of each egg.
However you garnish your dirty martini deviled eggs, make sure you stash a few before you serve them. When your egg plate comes home empty, you'll have a salty little nightcap to snack on after the party's over.