Ina Garten Turns Egg Salad Gourmet With A Spoonful Of This Fancy, Flavorful Butter

A couple things might give you pause about the egg salad recipe in Food Network celebrity and prolific writer Ina Garten's cookbook, "Simply Ina." First, it uses butter, which most egg salad recipes do not. Secondly, it doesn't use any ordinary butter, or even any supermarket's "fancy butter," but rather a more sumptuous truffle butter for one truly luxe preparation. "There's something about this high-low aspect of this that I absolutely love," Garten says in an Instagram video, in which she mashes the truffle butter together with separated hard-boiled egg yolks before finishing the salad more or less how you'd expect.

Truffle butter, of course, includes the typically expensive black or white truffles that command high prices in their whole form. A small container of lightly earthy, aromatic Urbani White Truffle Butter (the kind Garten uses) is a lot cheaper ($15.99) than even a ½-ounce morsel of the more intense, whole White Alba Truffle ($164). But, even suspended in butter, the prized ingredient still signals opulence in a way that one might not have previously associated with the luncheon classic, the occasional caviar-enhanced egg salad notwithstanding. It also gives your egg salad the essence of the savory fungi without having to pay a premium. Once you source some truffle butter of your own, Garten's egg salad is easier to recreate than a lot of other extravagant foodstuffs.

Should you have a favorite, even simple, egg salad recipe, you can tinker with the truffle butter to taste. Ina Garten ultimately uses a ratio of nine eggs to 1 ½ tablespoons of truffle butter, plus mayo, salt, pepper, and chives. Mingling the truffle butter with the yolks to begin with, as Garten does, is a great way to ensure proper distribution throughout the salad. However, you can incorporate the rest of the ingredients however you like, such as smashing them all in a bowl or pulverizing them in a food processor, to reach your desired consistency. You should also only use truffle butter in this egg salad. Even if you want to spend over $150 for that whole truffle, you don't want to calculate just how much to grate into your own compound butter versus spending around $15 on the premade blend.

Also, purported truffle oil should be avoided at home as much as it should be shunned in restaurants. What's labeled as truffle is often fake. You're more likely to encounter a supposed truffle oil containing chemicals aiming to approximate the real deal's fragrance and flavor than one made with actual truffles. Even if you did come into possession of a true truffle oil, its liquid consistency isn't optimal for egg salad. Truffle butter's creaminess mixes better with the similarly textured yolks without thinning them out like an oil would. You'll even have plenty left over to try your hand at Ina Garten's truffle butter mac and cheese.