The egg flight trend: Tim Dowling ranks 10 boiled egg appetisers - from perfect to never again

The Guardian

a day ago

Generally speaking, the more TikTok trends you allow to pass you by in a year, the better. But some trends refuse to cease, and the egg flight is turning out to be one of them. The egg flight, in all its many forms, persists.
Simply put, an egg flight is to hard-boiled eggs what a wine flight is to wine – a varietal sampling, presented in one sitting. Unlike devilled eggs, where the yolk is scooped out, mashed with mayonnaise and spices and piped back into its former cavity, the egg flight is just some eggs – most commonly three, in six upturned halves – with different stuff piled on top. The result is meant to be a quick but still fancy appetiser range, destined to impress your guests, your family, or at least the rest of TikTok.
The originator and chief populariser of the egg flight (or #eggflight) is an American cookery blogger and TikToker called Alice Choi (AKA @hipfoodiemom1). She has been doing them for years, but her egg demonstrations first went viral this time last year, and egg-flight TikTok posts now number in the thousands. All over the world, people are still getting excited about their egg flights.
Would-be egg-flight makers are encouraged to get creative and try new things, but in practice the discipline seems to involve a lot of imitation, in keeping with the average TikToker's overarching definition of originality: the exact same thing, but with me doing it.
In that same spirit, here are 10 popular variations, dutifully copied and ranked.
A quick note: my eggs were boiled for just under 11 minutes, plunged into ice water, then carefully peeled and halved. Before you begin, I recommend putting a small blob of mayonnaise on the plate beneath each egg half to stop it rocking back and forth while you dress it.
1. The Classic. In one of her viral tutorials, @hipfoodiemom1 offers the closest thing we may ever have to an Egg Flight Theory: the ideal egg requires something creamy, topped by something tangy, topped by something sour and/or crunchy. The Classic is the most basic combo to follow that formula and it's easily the best: mayo, dijon mustard and a slice of dill pickle. That's it – stop there. It's essentially a lazy person's devilled egg, and, honestly, it cannot be improved upon.
2. Kimchi. Another of Choi's creamy/tangy/sour stacks, with a mayo-mustard base and fermented cabbage at its apex. Overall this may be your best bet, since it's easier to buy good kimchi in the UK than it is to find a decent dill pickle.
3. Smoked salmon. A popular school of thought in egg-flight circles involves treating the egg as if it were some other foodstuff – in this case, a bagel layered with cream cheese, smoked salmon, capers, dill and possibly some poppy or sesame seeds. This sort of variation often flounders on its implicit unfulfilled promise – a hard-boiled egg is not a bagel, after all – but it works here because all the ingredients share a general breakfast vibe.
4. Caprese. Mozzarella, tomato, a single, appropriately sized basil leaf and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. By now you will have noticed a key drawback to the egg flight: you need a huge variety of ingredients – in very small amounts – to produce six completely different eggs. There is ultimately more shopping than cooking involved. The caprese salad egg is a nice idea, but at this point the notion of not bothering is also beginning to take hold.
5. Mexican. Across TikTok, you will find egg halves piled with a selection of some, if not all, of the following: guacamole, taco meat, tortilla slivers or crumbs, onion, tomato, sour cream, hot sauce, coriander, jalapeño. Of course that's way too many things – I strongly advise you to stick with a maximum of four. Anyway, these ingredients are not the problem. The problem is the hard-boiled egg at the bottom: it doesn't belong.
6. Pickled onion. Again, the rule of smooth-tangy-sour applies here – you need all three to offset the rubbery blandness of the egg. Choi pickles her own onions with rosemary and cinnamon and always has a jar on hand, but you can easily manage a quick pickle – thinly sliced onion steeped in salt and rice vinegar for half an hour. Or, in an emergency, you can just use mayo, mustard and raw onion, although I can't really imagine the set of circumstances that would lead to an egg-flight emergency.
7. Tzatziki. My only original contribution to the egg-flight canon, because I found that I had some tzatziki on hand – Greek yoghurt mixed with grated cucumber, minced garlic and chopped mint, with a sprinkling of paprika on top. I don't mean to blow my own horn, but this works better than perhaps it should. I have since seen other people on TikTok spooning tzatziki on eggs, and then pushing chickpeas into it. I cannot condone this.
8. BLT. You get the idea: bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayo. An enduring combination let down by the fact that the whole mouthful is still going to be 80% egg by weight – a flavour imbalance that simply cannot be corrected. It is possibly a little late in the game for me to confess that I don't really care for hard-boiled eggs, and I've already consumed more of them in an afternoon than I normally would in a year.
9. Caesar salad. Even if you love hard-boiled eggs – and I've made my position clear – you must eventually accept that the egg flight is a steeply descending staircase: the law of diminishing returns comes into effect once you've passed half a dozen variations. When you start making a caesar salad on top of an egg – lettuce, miniature croutons, dressing, parmesan shavings – you've taken things too far. It looks better in a photograph than it's ever going to taste.
10. Burger egg. Given my ambivalence toward the hard-boiled egg – which has long since curdled into full-blown hostility – the last variation I tried to make was always going to rank the lowest. This really was a disappointment, however: idiotically sized mini-burger, cheese square, tomato, ketchup. It's not a burger and it is not a fitting topping for an egg. Null points, and never again.