Grilled Eggs Give You A Smoky Flavor In Half The Time

Grilling is one of the great American pastimes, and everyone knows the basic stuff you can toss on your Weber: Ribs, steaks, mushrooms, zucchini, etc. But there are far more things you can cook than just those, including plenty of unusual foods to grill, like oysters on the half shell and tofu (although you definitely want to avoid grilling silken tofu). But the possibilities for grilling go beyond that to things you might not immediately think of — like eggs.

Yes, you can absolutely grill eggs, and what's more, you should. Appropriately done, grilling eggs, much like smoking, imparts the same qualities that make it such a desirable cooking method for so many other ingredients: A deep, rich, earthy smokiness that you just can't get with any other method. It's also incredibly easy — arguably more so than any other way to cook eggs — because you don't even need to crack the egg. And best of all, it's way, way faster than smoking them. Do be aware, though, that if you're working with a gas grill, you'll have to do a little more work.

The method for grilling eggs is simple and virtually identical to smoked eggs: Just put the uncracked egg on there, still in its shell. That's the entirety of the process for both preparations, as you don't even need to turn them.

But grilled eggs have a massive advantage over smoked eggs in that they're done much quicker. Smoking eggs can take several hours, but depending on the desired consistency, grilling eggs takes only 6-20 minutes. Ten minutes might be the sweet spot here; though that's about the same amount of time as it takes to make a hard-boiled egg, the result with a grilled egg will be a solid white and a semisolid yolk. Much like smoking eggs, finishing with an ice bath is also a great way not just to halt the cooking process but to make them easier to peel.

A charcoal grill will impart that smoky flavor automatically, but with a gas grill, there's an extra step to the process. The way to go here is to use wood chips. Many gas grills come with a built-in smoker box for the very purpose that you can put them right in there. If not, make a foil pouch for the chips with holes in the top to release the smoke. Either way, you don't even need to soak them, as soaking wood chips for grilling isn't as useful as we thought.

This isn't the only way to use a grill to cook eggs. A cast iron pan set on the grill is a great way to get some smoke flavor into fried eggs, and you can use a muffin tin (one egg per slot) to grill scrambled or fried eggs in convenient ring shapes. Cambodian grilled eggs, meanwhile, are a unique preparation that involves making a small hole in one end of the eggshell and another, even smaller in the other end, blowing the egg out, whisking it with spices, then using a funnel to put it back in the shell before inserting a skewer and grilling it. Whatever method you use, grilling eggs is a fun spin on a classic ingredient and something you should try next time you fire up a backyard barbecue.