Egg + Olives = Eggola
“I’d like an eggola martini, dirty.”
Photo by Melissa Schneider
Last December, Melissa and I went to a holiday party/potluck at Jack and Joanne’s house. Among many great dishes, two struck my “reproduce at home” nerve: the bacon toffee that captivated the crowd, and the pickled eggs that cookiecrumb brought. As our teeth and lips slurped off pieces of succulent, earthy eggs — the result of a 3-day soak in Kalamata olive brine — Melissa and I thought of the large jar of home-cured olives in our refrigerator. As soon as we emptied that jar, we thought, we would salvage the brine.
There was only one problem: I made a lot of olives. We ate the last one only two weeks ago. But we hadn’t forgotten about cookiecrumb’s eggs. Indeed, every few weeks, Melissa would ask me how many olives were left, by which she really meant, when could we make the eggs? We fidgeted in anticipation as I prepared the brine for the eggs, straining it through cheesecloth to get rid of the vegetal debris that fennel, garlic, and olives had left in the orange-brown liquid.
There’s no real recipe here. Make hard-cooked eggs by whichever technique you prefer. (Mine, lifted from Cook’s Illustrated: Put eggs in pot and cover with an inch of water. Bring just to a boil. Remove from heat and cover. Let sit for 10 minutes. Ice bath the eggs.) Plop the cooked and peeled eggs into the olive brine and leave the jar in the refrigerator for a few days. (Forgot to make olives last year? No problem: Just follow cookiecrumb's lead and use the brine from a can of olives.) The salt toughens the whites, so you might want to snatch the eggs from their hot water a little earlier.
My eggs — Melissa dubbed them “eggolas” — lacked the deep flavor of cookiecrumb’s, but they combined a delicate green-olive taste with rich egginess and a snack-food saltiness. Top half a pickled egg with a dollop of homemade rabbit rillettes, however, and you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. (Given the fat-to-volume ratio of each bite, you just might.) We only lacked a glass of zingy Bandol Blanc to wash it down.
I made a second batch of eggs, but now I’m thinking of other uses for the salty, flavorful liquid. I've added a couple of mozzarella balls to see what happens, I could brine meat in it (once), and I might add acid to make a quick-pickle liquid. I just have to decide which route to go.
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