How To Add More Texture To Your Egg Salad With Ease

Egg salad is one of those simple dishes where even the slightest details can make a huge difference. With mayo and hard-boiled eggs being the only crucial ingredients, any tweak you make to the blueprint completely transforms the dish. The texture, in particular, can make or break an egg salad cup or sandwich — we all wish we could put a permanent end to watery egg salad, for instance. It turns out that getting a much more satisfying texture can be ridiculously easy. 

Chef James Callery told Chowhound that he prefers to completely mash some of his eggs and give others a rough chop. Similarly, food blogger Corrie Duffy of Corrie Cooks recommends blending finely chopped eggs with rough-chopped ones as a way to make a stellar egg salad sandwich. Chef Geoffrey Zakarian shared his preferred method on TikTok: he gives the eggs a rough chop by snipping them up with scissors, then mashes in the rest of the ingredients with a fork. Chopping the eggs in multiple ways like this gives your sandwich a more toothsome bite, with the chunky whites giving you a delightful contrast with the smoother parts of the sandwich. 

You can also play around with how you hard-boil the eggs if you want to find the perfect texture. If you find the whites too firm, you can try boiling them for a minute shorter, and then dumping them into an ice bath to arrest the cooking process. Alternatively, you could also steam your hard-boiled eggs to make them more tender.

If you enjoy having a balance between creamy and chunky in your egg salad, you could also try Corrie Duffy's trick of mixing in a blend of Greek yogurt and mayo with the eggs. The Greek yogurt can lighten up the texture of the mayo while adding a mild tang and creaminess to the overall flavor. It'll still taste like a classic egg salad, but with less of the oiliness that you'd get if you only used mayonnaise.

Straying away from the basic flavor profile of egg salad opens up a ton of other options for tweaking its texture. For instance, swapping out the mayo for cottage cheese is an egg salad game-changer because the curds can help it feel airier, but it also tastes less rich because it has lower fat content. Mixing in bacon bits to your egg salad will add little pockets of crunch, while also making a sandwich saltier, smokier, and a touch fattier. If that sounds a little too decadent, you can try brightening up the flavors with chopped onion and chives.

There are countless ways to upgrade your egg salad, and the truth is that there's no one method that's superior to all the others; there's only what goes best with your personal tastes. It's all about experimenting with different ingredients and techniques to get you that perfect mouthful of egg salad — whatever texture it may be.