Glorious eggs: so versatile, so perfect, they deserve to be celebrated morning to midnight

A dozen eggs from New Barn Organics. Labeled “large,” his particular dozen varies in weight from 55 grams to 68 grams.

By Leslie Brenner

“If bananas were extremely expensive,” my mom used to say, “we’d consider them a luxury item.”

I’ve been thinking about eggs in a similar light. An everyday staple for the entire history of agricultural humankind, they are now very expensive. Their price has recently dropped from its historic retail high of $4.25 for a dozen large grade AA, but they’re still quite pricy.

Their formidable price tag no doubt causes some cooks to shy away from them, but I’m taking my mom’s tack, and using the occasion to celebrate them.

Honestly, is there anything more perfect and versatile than an egg? Its usefulness and beauty begins in the morning, with a scramble, poach or sunny-side-up. A little butter, salt and pepper helps for the two achieved out of water, but otherwise, that egg performs brilliantly solo. You could have an egg-salad sandwich for lunch (basically chopped hard-boiled eggs and mayo, maybe a little celery and onion, between bread — and that mayo is largely eggs). And for dinner, there are few things more gratifying than perfect French omelette. Dessert? Anything with meringues makes brilliant use of the whites, and anything custardy (vanilla ice cream!) makes use of the yolks. Ever hear of the French dessert île flottante — floating island? That’s soft meringues (whites + sugar) floating on a sea of custard (yolks + sugar + vanilla).

Of course eggs are also supporting players in a million different dishes. They’re such important and delicious supporting players that they can sometimes even upstage main ingredients. What’s wrong with that? Nothing!

I’ve rounded up a bunch of my favorite ways to celebrate and elevate elegant, expensive eggs.

Devil them

A fabulous appetizer to feed a crowd, deviled eggs are super easy to make. Boil them, halve them, combine the yolks with mayo and seasonings, fill up the halves and garnish.

Try these Harissa Deviled Eggs from Kate Leahy’s delightful 2021 cookbook Wine Style.

Make a new-wave gribiche

Soft-boil a few eggs and fold them with chopped cornichons, capers, shallots and herbs, plus vinegar, lemon juice, mustard and seasonings, and you get a sauce that’s fabulous on top of poached asparagus, folded into potato salad, or spooned over grilled fish.

READ: “Sauce gribiche makes every simple thing you cook instantly delicious”

Soft-boil them and use them to dress an Extreme Caesar

Raw egg has a place in Caesar salad’s origin story, but I like to play up eggs’ role by soft-boiling them and tossing them into a garlicky Caesar gently.

Japanese potato salad topped with an ajitsama egg

Make marinated Japanese-style ajitsama eggs

Boil eggs for exactly 6 minutes, peel them and marinate them 4 hours to overnight in a solution of mirin, soy sauce and water. Use them to top ramen, or take a cue from Dallas chef Justin Holt and use them to garnish Japanese potato salad.

Whisk them into a Persian Fresh Herb Kuku

An Iranian cousin to the Italian frittata, this fresh herb kuku is packed with chopped fresh dill, parsley, spring onions, cilantro and walnuts — a glorious vegetarian main course. If by some miracle you don’t eat it all, it’s also excellent served room-temperature the next day. It’s adapted from our favorite Persian cookbook: Food of Life by Najmieh Batmanglij.

Bake a quiche

You could make this one with mushrooms and spinach, or this Quintessential Quiche Lorraine.

Make spectacular mayo

Using a stick blender, Our Favorite Mayonnaise is easier than you might think. It just requires a little whisking at the end. Slather it into a BLT, stir it into next-level tuna salad (or egg salad!), fold it into julienned celery root for bistro classic Céleri Rémoulade or into diced blanched veg for a Macédoine de Légumes. Find lots of deas in our mayo story from last August — including my new favorite sauce for dipping asparagus.

Create a gorgeous Pavlova

Don’t throw away the egg whites after using the yolks to make mayo — instead use the whites to make meringue for a Pavlova.

Whether it’s filled with fruit and whipped cream, rolled up and sliced — like this Showstopper Rolled Pavlova with Peaches and Blackberries from Ottolenghi Simple — or simply topped with whipped cream and berries, you’ll have a stunning and sweet way to end meals spring through the end of summer.

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Got gorgeous spring vegetables? These three recipes spotlight them deliciously

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Olivia Lopez’s Tetelas with Spring Vegetables

By Leslie Brenner

There’s nothing like the season’s first asparagus, favas, green garbanzos and English peas to excite produce-worshiping cooks. And when treasures like ramps, morels or fiddlehead ferns turn up on a forest walk or a swing through the farmer’s market, the urge to create something special inevitably swells into can’t-wait-to-get-these-in-a-pan.

It’s not always easy to find recipes starring the more fleeting of these vegetables; improvising is great route, if you’ve got some skills and a bit of flair. Happily, all these springtime treats go beautifully together, whether on a savory tart, a quick sauté or a salad. Or you could resurrect that old 70’s-and-80’s standby, pasta primavera.

Don’t forget that you can round out a combo with more commonplace springy veg — slender young carrots, French green beans, sugar snap peas and radishes. And no one will arrest you if you toss in something frozen, like peas, shelled favas or artichoke hearts.

Harmony in a soup plate

Two years ago, I was smitten by a beautiful spring vegetable soup Ellie Krieger had created for The Washington Post, and took it a step farther by broadening the palette of vegetables and making it vegan. (It’s based on leek broth rather than chicken broth; you could also use store-bought vegetable broth.) Besides asparagus, carrots, French green beans, turnips and baby spinach leaves, it also calls for English peas or frozen peas. You could substitute sugar snaps, and add or subtract whatever — quartered radishes, favas, morels, green garbanzos and garlic scapes would all be fabulous additions (toss them in when you cook the diced turnips).

Garden-fresh modern Mexican

Or take a tip from Cooks Without Borders’ Mexican cuisine expert Olivia Lopez and give her Tetelas with Spring Vegetables a whirl. The triangular tetelas are made from heirloom masa harina that you press into tortilla rounds, fill with vegan refried beans and cook on a griddle or comal. Top them with beautiful tumble of sautéd spring veg enlivened with lime and cilantro, plus charred scallion and blips of requesón (fresh Mexican cheese) or ricotta. If you happen to have some salsa macha, it’s wonderful drizzled on as a final florish. (Or not!)

RECIPE: Olivia Lopez’s Tetelas with Spring Vegetables

The dish has a similar vibe to a dish Olivia has created for a Molino Olōyō pop-up dinner in Dallas on April 17. Leading off a tasting menu of eight courses, her Sopecito con Alcachofa will feature baby artichokes, garden peas, green onions and requesón. “Spring ingredients were the inspiration for both,” she says. (There are still a few seats available — more info here.)

Luxurious springtime stew inspired by Spain

Finally, though this dish was inspired by a soup — minestra de primavera, traditional in the Navarre and Rioja regions of Spain — in the hands of superstar cookbook author Claudia Roden, it’s more like a spring stew.

A little cured pork in the form of prosciutto, serrano ham or bacon gives it depth and umami; cooking the vegetables long enough so they’re meltingly tender makes it deeply delicious. It’s definitely for folks won’t don’t want their vegetables crunchy. I highly recommended it.

RECIPE: Claudia Roden’s Medley of Spring Vegetables

Let yourself riff on any of the three recipes, and the possibilities are endless.

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Classic French lemon tart: After 15 years of tinkering with the recipe, this is the one we adore

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By Leslie Brenner

Among all the desserts in all the world, it’s hard to think of one more enduringly craveable and satisfying than a classic French lemon tart. At this moment before berries fully rev up (and as cherries and peaches quietly prepare to steal our hearts), a tarte au citron is a deliciously tangy way to celebrate spring.

Sunny and optimistic, the iconic dessert is almost absurdly simple: just a pastry shell filled with lemon curd. Yet it’s so purely pleasurable it never goes out of style.

But what’s the best recipe? After many years of tinkering, I’ve distilled everything I’ve learned into one I think is just right. As with many things that are simple, it’s all about the quality of those components and how they talk to each other.

For the shell, some recipes use a short crust (pâte brisée) with a touch of sugar; others use a sweet pâte sablé, made with egg and lots of powdered sugar. Lemon curds are similar at their base — eggs, sugar, lemon juice and butter, cooked on top of the stove to creamy-custardy. But differences in approach, amounts of ingredients and technique can change the quality of the tart, sometimes dramatically.

The lemon tart’s power to cheer is remarkable. Back in 2008, when the global financial crisis hit, I baked one nearly every day for couple months to keep my spirits up, doing something slightly different each time. Since then, I’ve turned to it whenever I crave that gorgeous lemony blast, experimenting with different crusts, using more or less sugar, changing up the egg-approach, how much butter to use or when to incorporate it. Sometimes, I’d act like a lemon tart virgin and faithfully follow a recipe in a new cookbook, hungry to discover something fresh.

What I’ve learned over these many years is that despite the oft-cited dictum that baking is an exact science, a lemon tart gives you plenty of room for error, and inevitably plenty of joy. There’s more room for improvisation than you’d think. If you know the basics of how to make a crust, you can hardly go wrong, and lemon curd is not difficult or finicky.

I also learned that there’s a world of difference between a good lemon tart and a great lemon tart.

To me, the ideal is a very lemony one that’s not overly sweet, with depth of flavor, a velvety texture and a crust that’s brilliantly tender and buttery. And as a cook, I want a recipe that yields spectacular results every time with as little fuss as possible and in the shortest time.

A short crust pressed into a tart pan, before blind-baking

The question of crust

Choosing between pâte brisée and pâte sablé was easy for me; with a palate more savory than sweet, I’ve always been a short crust fan. Before my 2008 tart follies, I was accustomed to crusts that you form, chill and rest, roll out, fit into the pan, chill again, fill with weights, and bake. I think it was my friend Michalene who suggested I try the short crust in Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsey Shere (the iconic restaurant’s original pastry chef).

Here’s something beautiful: It doesn’t require rolling. You start with butter that’s not too cold, work it into the flour with your fingers, gather it into a ball, let it chill, then use your fingers to press the dough into a tart pan with a removeable bottom. Chill that, then blind-bake it (no pie weights necessary) till it’s golden. Much shorter from start to finish, less messy, less scary.

It’s a beautiful crust that’s more tender than any other I’ve made. I’ve tweaked Shere’s original a bit over the years — yielding a bit more dough so it stretches more easily into a 9-inch pan, and decreasing resting/chilling time. It’s just as wonderful.

Conquering curd

As for the curd, there’s an aesthetic divide among lemon tart creators: Some fill the blind-baked crust with chilled curd and say voilà, while others fill the blind-baked crust then bake it again with the curd. The first way results in a filling that’s silky and creamy; the second is nicely set and firmer, more like velvet than silk. I prefer the texture of the baked filling, and feel that the time in the oven adds depth of flavor as well.

A lemon tart with an unbaked filling — smooth, silky and lovely, but not the vibe that rocks our boat

To make the curd, you can use whole eggs or a combination of whole eggs and yolks, for extra richness. Personally, I don’t need it to be extra-rich, so I use whole eggs without messing with separating them just for the yolks. (And that way I’m not left with unspoken-for egg whites.) When to add the butter is another question. You can drop it in directly after combining the eggs, sugar and lemon juice, and let it melt as you start cooking, or whisk in cold bits of butter after you’ve cooked the eggs, sugar and lemon juice.

And then there’s the matter of how sweet or tart to make it. Shere’s recipe for lemon curd filling, published in that same cookbook in 1985, calls for 6 tablespoons of sugar (roughly 1/3 cup) for a 9-inch tart. These days, many recipes call for double or triple that much sugar, or more. (A recipe for French Riviera Lemon Tart in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking with Dorie calls for 3/4 cup sugar; the Pioneer Woman’s Lemon Tart filling calls for 1 1/4 cup.) America’s sweet tooth wants more and more sugar.

Not me. I like my lemon tart more tart and my sugar consumption in check, so my recipe calls for 1/2 cup. If you’re worried that won’t be sweet enough, consider that my bookshelves are filled with classic old cookbooks calling for 1/2 cup sugar for their 9-inch classic tartes au citron: It’s sweet enough for history — and for my husband and his sweet-tooth.

On board for the sunny, tangy treat? Make one next weekend! It’ll be just the thing for an Easter brunch, a special dinner with friends, or a just-because-I-deserve it pick me up.

Our favorite lemon tart: press-in short crust, baked filling, not-too-sweet

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