Make Egg Salad The Star Of The Show With One Powerhouse Italian Ingredient

Eggs can be quite bland on their own. Even the best hard boiled eggs need at least a few seasonings, and a smattering of mayo, to begin approximating a fully formed egg salad, but it's egg salad upgrades that take them from edible to incredible — and pesto packs a ton of flavor into any egg salad for one simple sauce.

Pesto can refer to all manner of sauces made with everyone's favorite bashing tools, the mortar and pestle, but for this egg salad zag, we're focusing on the lovely, green, pesto alla Genovese that many Americans are probably most familiar with. This adaptable combination of basil, garlic, pine nuts, parmesan, and olive oil is a who's who of ingredients that go terrifically with egg salad. Okay, maybe not the nuts in their whole form, but they're pounded beyond recognition so that only their essence, and a subtle extra texture, remains. Plus, you can transform an ordinary egg salad into a pesto egg salad in anywhere from seconds to minutes.

Should you wish to dress up your favorite, simple egg salad with an equally easy improvement, store-bought pesto does the trick in no time. Start with about 1 teaspoon per egg, stirring it in with the mayo, rather than to the otherwise complete salad, to improve its distribution. This timing also better lets you control your pesto's intensity, and the overall salad's texture. Were you to stir it with the eggs until you got the proportions right, the eggs would break down much more than you intend before too long.

Pesto is also a cinch to make from scratch. You can more or less eyeball it while the eggs boil. A couple bunches of basil, about ½ cup of pine nuts, 1 cup of parmesan, your household's preference of garlic, enough olive oil to hold it all together, and a pinch of salt all bashed together in your mortar and pestle, or pulsed in a food processor, is as good a start as any. The same starting egg salad proportion (1 teaspoon per egg) still applies — but we think you'll end up adding more.