Deviled Egg Recipe

Deviled eggs,  as a chef they are not something that you put on a party menu that often, or at all. In my years in the kitchen I can only think of once that someone requested that deviled eggs be on the menu. This posed a problem, how do you make deviled eggs anything other than just deviled eggs, what do you do to them so that party goers tell each other “have you had the deviled eggs yet?” This deviled egg recipe is the answer to that problem. You can scroll down to the recipe if you like, or you can read a funny story about the first time I made these deviled eggs.

It was mid July, it was hot, we had a party for 250 starting in a few hours, a 90th birthday party for an ex Ford motor company executive. Hand passed hors d’ oeuvres followed by a sit down plated dinner. The kind of thing you don’t want to screw up. I had met with the birthday boys family earlier in the month to set the menu, they gave me free rein with only one directive. Pops loves deviled eggs, he has deviled eggs every year on his birthday, you HAVE to serve deviled eggs at some point during the party. Well, I tried out several different recipes, and finally came up with one I liked, that I felt was upscale enough to serve.

Back to that July afternoon. I had come in early, started getting things prepped, and directing the cooks on preparation, the phone rings, someone picks it up, talks for a bit and then yells to me “Chef, Brock ain’t coming in, he’s in jail” great, Brock was supposed to come in and help with the party prep, time to scramble.

I take a look at the schedule. Who can I call, who can I pull from another area, but I am running lean already, then like a gleaming beacon of hope, I realize I screwed up and scheduled an extra dishwasher.

I stick my head into the dish room and see my savior standing there, Tyrese. Tyrese and I have the same last name, and he likes to jokingly tell people that I am his cousin, he is very short, very wide and very dark. He is also one of my favorite people, he is funny and always smiling, the kind of person I would hang out with outside of work. Sadly the kind of person I would hang out with doesn’t always make the model employee. Tyrese not only epitomized the bad employee, he took it to a new level, an art form if you will. Late? Almost always. Disappearing act? Abracadabra where’s Tyrese? Drug use? Unapologetically talking about how high he got on his lunch break. Good person? Absolutely!

Tyrese sees me , a giant grin splits his face and he says”Hey boss man!” That is what Tyrese calls me, boss man, unless he’s calling me Cuz.

“Tyrese, I need you to help do some prep, Brock isn’t coming in, you feel up to it?” of course he does! Anything to get out of the dish pit. As a first task I tell him to start on the deviled eggs. “Cut them all in half, drop the yolks in the mixer, be careful not to tear the white and then come get me and I will make the filling. I figure this is something easy that he can do with no supervision. Easy, repetitive, very repetitive, 175 boiled eggs repetitive. I leave Tyrese and go check on parts of the party.

45 minutes later, “Bossman, I’m done” Great, I get the other ingredients that had been prepped, and start making the filling, I check the time, we are doing OK on time, it will be tight but we will be fine.

Just then, another cook shows up, one of his buddies that was working short on the party had called and coerced him into showing up, its funny how that works, I couldn’t even get him to pick up the phone. Super, things are looking up. I thank Tyrese for the help and send him back to the dish room. I tell the guy who just came in to finish up the filling and pipe it into the eggs and then move on to the items on a prep list I have for him.

I look at the clock, 45 minutes til serve, so about 30 minutes til we need to be completely done. I make a quick run through the dining room, making sure everything is set, talk to the servers about the items on the hours d’oeuvres tray, and the plated dinner, check uniforms, and table settings, talk to the dining room manager. Front of the house is good.

And this is where things get ugly. I return to the kitchen, the cook who had come in to help comes up to me, “There you are, we have a real big problem” he takes me to where he was working on the eggs and points at a hotel pan full of the cooked egg whites, I pick one up and stare in disbelief, what I’m seeing can’t be real, I look down at the pan, 350 half egg whites stare up at me, which is what you would expect, since I had asked Tyrese to cut the eggs in half and put the yolks in the mixer bowl. What you wouldn’t expect is that 1. Tyrese must never have seen a deviled egg, or 2.Tyrese is the most avant-garde egg cutter in the south. Every egg, perfectly cut in half, not lengthwise, but crosswise. I look down and watch in horror as two rounded egg ends roll in lazy semi circles on the tray, how the hell are we going to fix this? We spend the next 10 minutes feverishly trimming the ends off of each egg creating a small flat area for it to stand on, and piping them full of filling. Now, I can look back and laugh, then I was to close to the situation for it to hold any humor.

Several months after I left that job, Tyrese was at a party at a friends house, he said he wasn’t feeling great, and went to sleep on the couch, he never woke up.

Wherever you are Tyrese, I hope they have deviled eggs Cuz.

Deviled Egg Recipe

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