Pickled Onions Add A Final Flavorful Touch To Egg Salad

Egg salad is great as a sandwich filling, but this wholesome and easy dish can also be enjoyed with crackers for a hearty snack. Egg salad typically draws its flavor from ingredients like paprika, mayonnaise, mustard, and onions. While fresh onions are a common accompaniment, using pickled onions instead can imbue your favorite egg salad recipe with a bold, unbeatable flavor.

While undeniably tasty, egg salad can be a little bland on its own. Adding a pickled element can elevate the mixture by imparting a bit of brightness and acidity. Pickled onions help temper the dish's richness and contribute to a more complex flavor than you might find in traditional recipes. For example, with pickled red onions, you can expect a combination of sweet and mildly sour flavors. However, pickled onions come in a wide variety, meaning you're free to experiment with other combinations until you find one that best suits your palate.

Along with red onions, shallots are another common selection for pickling. While technically not an onion, shallots belong to the same family as the eye-watering vegetables and come in three main varieties. Although the flavor profile of shallots is very similar to onions, they generally have a more subtle taste. Accordingly, they're a fine selection if you only want a minor adjustment to your egg salad, as a more subtle flavor allows the rest of the ingredients to stand out.

White onions can also be pickled and make another good option if you're looking for a less potent flavor. White onions are known for their pleasant sweetness, especially when compared to yellow onions. When pickled, white onions lack some of the tanginess of red onions but will impart a wonderfully sweet flavor to your egg salad. After deciding which type of pickled onion to add to your recipe, the next step involves weighing homemade varieties against store-bought ones.

Visit nearly any grocery store, and you'll be privy to a wide selection of pickled onions. For example, red onions, white onions, cocktail onions, Vidalia onions, and spicy varieties are all relatively easy to find at most grocery chains. If you're seeking a quick addition to egg salad, store-bought pickled onions have much to offer in terms of flavor and quality.

However, if you're a fan of doing things yourself, you'll be thrilled to know it's simple to pickle onions at home. You only need to create a sugar and vinegar solution and briefly submerge a few onion slices to enjoy freshly pickled onions in your egg salad. If you want to create an intensely bold flavor profile, add other ingredients, such as red pepper flakes and garlic, and let the onions rest in the solution for eight hours minimum. 

No matter which option you choose, you'll never look at humble egg salad the same way again after you incorporate pickled onions into the mix.