Pickled Eggs

This is essentially the same recipe for pickling as this one – and comes with the same botulism potential alert! – but a slightly different technique. The risk here is overcooking the yolk because you’re starting with eggs that have been already boiled and then adding hot liquid. When you overcook a hardboiled egg, the yolk turns gray on the outside. You know what I mean – you’ve seen that at salad bars at Korean delis or Ponderosa Steakhouses or whatever, and occasionally, when you’re grandma cooks you an egg but she’s really old so she lost her touch or lost track of time. There is never ever any other any other excuse for a gray yolk, and if you’re ever in any restaurant that serves you one, you are completely justified in walking out, just like you are in any restaurant that advertises hand cut fries but clearly doesn’t cook them twice.

The beet juice adds a remarkably appealing color to the eggs, so these should always be served sliced. If you leave them in the pickle juice with beet liquid for a day, the deep crimson will penetrate about an 1/8^th of an inch deep and will form a hard line – if you leave it for more, it will penetrate further and the line between red and white will become a gradient. You DON’T want the latter – so remove the eggs from the pickling liquid a day or a day and a half after submerging them so the process stops. If you have non-beeted pickling liquid, you could continue to store them in here, but really, you should be eating these quickly. You should experiment in any case with how long to leave it. You can also do this to make deviled eggs – the contrast between the crimson, white, and bright yellow of the yolk is really lovely.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups white wine vinegar
• 2 cups water
• 2 TBS pickling spice
• 6 eggs, hard boiled about half way – the white should be firm enough to peel but the yolk should still be runny and about half cooked (you may need to experiment to get this right
• 1 cup beet juice, which you can get from this recipe (strain it first to make sure that none of the dirt or sand that was on the beet skin makes it through to this recipe)

Directions:

Place all the pickling liquid in a pot and bring to a boil. Boil together for about 10 minutes, then kill the heat.

Mean while, hard boil your eggs. A quick primer on how to do this – there are many techniques, but the one that works best for me is the gentlest: place them in a large pot of cold water (if you use a smaller pot, it will lose heat too quickly during the next phase), add a little salt and a dash of white vinegar, and place on high heat. When the water JUST comes to a boil, turn the heat off and cover, then let sit while the eggs cook. For normal hard boiled eggs, you want to leave them in 7-9 minutes, depending on the size of the egg. Also you’ll want to note if they are coming straight from the fridge and are therefore cold, or have been sitting out since you brought them back from the store 30 minutes ago and were preparing other stuff. I’m assuming you’re starting with them cold.

For this recipe, you’ll want to leave them in for 4-5 minutes. Either way, when they’re done, place them in an ice bath for a couple minutes to stop the cooking.

Carefully peel the eggs, rinse them off, and place them in a container. Pour the pickling liquid over them and add the beet juice. Place in the refrigerator immediately, leaving it uncovered, for about 30 minutes, then cover and refrigerate for a day before slicing and serving. You’ll want to play with the timing to get them perfect, depending on the size of your eggs.

Slice, garnish, or not, serve, and enjoy.