Emeril Lagasse's Egg Salad Recipe Comes With A Surprising Kick

Some people might tell you that the best way to toss an egg salad is in the garbage. And if you're used to the most flavorful part of an egg salad sandwich being the bread, you might be inclined to agree. In addition to being yucky to yolk-haters, it has a nasty habit of smelling like sulfur (via Leaftv). No one wants to munch on chunks of flatulence-scented blandness slathered in mayonnaise.

But before you throw the baby chicken out with the boiled bathwater, remember that eggs are good sources of vitamins A and D. They also pack ample choline, a crucial nutritional multitasker that facilitates muscle growth, helps keep your liver in tip-top shape, assists your nervous system in performing automatic processes like breathing, and plays an indispensable part in proper brain development (via Medical News Today). And since the lutein and zeaxanthin in eggs aid eyesight, it should be easy to see that egg salad is a nutritionally efficient addition to your diet. So instead of kicking it to the curb, how about kicking it up a notch?

The Rockettes notwithstanding, probably nobody is better known for kicking things up than chef Emeril Lagasse. As the flamboyant ambassador of Southwestern and Creole cuisine, the former Food Network staple turned bombast into "bam!-bast" and adds that same unmistakable flair to food (via First We Feast). And it just so happens that he has a recipe for egg salad that kicks butt.

Men's Journal shares the recipe for Egg Salad Supreme from Lagasse's book, Emeril's Kicked-Up Sandwiches: Stacked with Flavor. On its face, the sandwich seems extremely basic. You hard-boil a bunch of eggs and add the obligatory mayonnaise, which is kind of like adding more eggs. Toss shallots, parsley (or green onion), salt, and minced celery into the mix. So far, so what, right? Well, here's the kicker: Lagasse puts dry mustard and Hungarian paprika in this egg salad, imbuing it with what's been characterized as a wasabi-like potency.

Since the vast majority of Americans have probably never eaten authentic wasabi, we assume Egg Salad Supreme kicks like horseradish. After all, the pungence of mustard powder helps horseradish masquerade as wasabi. As for Hungarian paprika, Bon Appetit says it forms part of the backbone of Hungarian cooking and features in Hungary's national dish, goulash. Unlike the more homogenous American variant, Hungarian paprika touts 8 distinct flavor profiles. On one end of the spectrum, it's mild and red, and on the other, it's sharp, peppery, and pale orange. The form most familiar outside Hungary is édesnemes, which packs a spicy wallop but is also sweet, forming a one-two pu- uhh, kick, of flavor.

Heather Scholten, a co-founder of company Spiceology and the blogger behind FarmgirlGourmet, gave Lagasse's recipe a whirl and wasn't disappointed: "Well, this is definitely not your ordinary eggy deliciousness. It's 'kicked up' as Emeril would say. And in a goooooooood way!"