If You Only Make One Celebrity Chef Egg Salad, Go With Carla Hall's

Egg salad may not be the most exciting of sandwich fillings. Its reputation is tainted by those week-after-Easter associations with being everyone's go-to for using up leftover hard-boiled eggs. Still, celebrity chefs like to have a few down-to-earth items in their repertoire, perhaps because you're likely to turn off a significant proportion of potential viewers if everything you make involves beluga caviar and foie gras. In fact, when we went looking for celebrity chef egg salad recipes, we were able to unearth seven different ones. While each has its merits, we felt that Carla Hall's recipe was the overall best bet.

Hall's egg salad isn't all that elaborate, as apart from eggs and mayonnaise — both of which are de rigueur — it's flavored with nothing more than mustard, onions, and chives (which may look and taste like green onions but are technically only onion-adjacent). What sets her recipe apart from the other salads, though, is Hall's unusual egg-separating technique.

Instead of mashing the whites and yolks together, she tears up the former, then crumbles the latter, claiming that doing so makes the eggs creamier. From all accounts, it actually works; go figure. If light, fluffy, and fairly simple is how you want your egg salad, this one's a winner.

It may be that, if you're looking for a celebrity-endorsed recipe (whether for egg salad or any other dish), you want it to have a little glitz and glamour. While we haven't been able to unearth any egg salads made with gold leaf or über-expensive capital-C Champagne, most celeb chefs other than Hall do like to add a few extra ingredients to dress up their recipes.

Sunny Anderson adds ham to her egg salad, while Alton Brown goes with bacon. Needless to say, both breakfast meats pair well with eggs, even boiled ones, although we're not entirely sold on the concept of egg salad sandwiches for a morning meal. Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray, and Geoffrey Zakarian add vegetables to their egg salads instead of meat, opting respectively for avocados, potatoes, and bell peppers.

Surprisingly enough, Emeril Lagasse's egg salad is on the plain side. Although he doesn't tear up his eggs, his basic recipe isn't all that different from Hall's own. The only flavoring agents he uses are shallots, mustard (he prefers the dry kind), and hot paprika, none of which really bring the bam!