Avocado and Egg Salad Recipe
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Creamy avocado and hard-boiled egg combine for a quick, protein-packed salad that's incredibly versatile. Enjoy it on toast, in wraps, or on a bed of crisp greens.
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Why I Love This Creamy Avocado and Egg Salad
Egg salad is really good, but adding creamy avocado takes that flavor to the next level. Each bite is a perfect blend of protein and healthy fats, satisfying without weighing me down.
On days when I have a few hard-boiled eggs sitting in the fridge and an avocado that is begging to be used, this salad is perfect. With the eggs already cooked it comes together in 10 minutes, and starting from a cold pan it is still only half an hour. This is one of those meals I’ll eat after the gym, or when I fancy something fresh but hearty.
Some of my favorite ways to serve this salad are:
- piled high on seedy toast
- as a sandwich or wrap filler for a portable lunch
- over a bed of salad greens with extra herbs
Warm days, picnic tables, meal prep lunches: this recipe flexes to fit just about any scenario. And if you want to dress it up, a sprinkle of fresh herbs or a little hot sauce does the trick. It’s uncomplicated, nourishing, and always delivers.
The story
Egg Salad Was Bound With Butter Long Before Mayonnaise Existed
Egg salad is defined today by the ingredient it is usually made with, which is odd, because the dish is older than the jar. Richard Hellmann spooned his wife’s mayonnaise out of big glass jars for customers at his Columbus Avenue delicatessen in New York from 1905, but did not sell it sealed in jars of his own until September 1912. Before that, a home cook chopping boiled eggs bound them with softened butter, or with the cooked flour-and-vinegar mixture the period cookbooks call boiled dressing.
Which means the mayonnaise-free egg salad now filed under health food is closer to the original than the deli scoop is. Go back further and the dish loses its bowl entirely: salmagundi, the layered English salad of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arranged chopped boiled egg as one stratum among anchovies, onion and greens. American egg salad is more or less salmagundi collapsed into a single mixture and spread on bread.
The avocado half of the recipe is younger and considerably stranger. Every Hass avocado anyone has ever eaten came off a tree that is a cutting from one tree. Rudolph Hass, a mail carrier in La Habra Heights, California, bought a handful of seeds in 1926 and grew a seedling he twice tried to graft over to something more commercial. It refused to take, so he let it fruit, and his children liked the fruit better than the Fuerte everybody grew at the time. He patented the tree in 1935. It was cut down in 2002, aged 76, after root rot got into it, and every commercial Hass in the world is a graft descended from it.
For a vegetarian kitchen the pairing does one thing worth noticing. Mayonnaise is egg and oil, so classic egg salad is eggs held together with more egg. Swapping it for avocado is a rare substitution that adds rather than subtracts: a serving here carries about 7 g of fiber, where a mayonnaise egg salad has essentially none.
What to buy
Ingredient Notes
Avocados
Hass, ripe but not soft. Press near the stem end rather than the middle, which has already been squeezed by everyone else in the shop and bruises into a false reading. Flick off the little stem cap: green underneath means ready, brown means you are too late. An underripe avocado will not mash into a dressing at all, it shreds into pale pellets, and no amount of folding rescues it. Two medium Hass give roughly 400 g of flesh; if yours are the size of a fist, use one and a half.
Eggs
Older eggs peel better, which is the opposite of what most shopping advice implies. A fresh egg white is more acidic and bonds hard to the inner shell membrane; as the egg sits in the fridge the white drifts alkaline and lets go, and the air cell grows enough to give you somewhere to start. If you buy eggs at a farm gate, the ones from last week are the ones to cook. Steaming is in the method precisely because it forces the issue on eggs that are still too fresh to cooperate.
Lemon juice
Fresh, not bottled. It is the seasoning and the anti-browning agent at once, so the flat, faintly cooked note of bottled juice has nowhere to hide. Lime works and pushes the whole thing towards guacamole, which you may want. Cider vinegar holds the color just as well but tastes wrong at this volume, so use half as much.
Dijon mustard
It looks optional and it is not. A teaspoon across four servings never reads as mustard in the finished salad; what it does is cut the fat and keep the dish tasting like egg salad rather than guacamole with egg stirred through it. Wholegrain works and leaves visible seeds. Yellow ballpark mustard also works and makes the whole thing taste like a picnic.
Chives or scallion greens
Egg and avocado are both soft, rich and almost without aroma, so the allium is the only sharp thing in the bowl and the salad is a single flat note without it. Chives are mildest, scallion greens next. Raw white onion or shallot is too aggressive unless you rinse it: soak it finely diced in cold water for ten minutes, drain well, and it behaves.
Mayonnaise or Greek yogurt (optional)
Genuinely optional here, which is not true of most egg salad, because the mashed half of the avocado is already doing the binding. A tablespoon buys a little tang and some insurance if your avocados came out firmer than you hoped. Greek yogurt makes it lighter and slightly sour, and means the recipe is no longer dairy free.
Creamy Avocado and Egg Salad
Hard-boiled eggs folded into avocado that has been half mashed into its own dressing, so the salad comes out creamy with no mayonnaise required.
Ingredients
Equipment
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Instructions
- 1
Steam the eggs
Bring an inch of water to a rolling boil in a saucepan. Lower the eggs in on a steamer basket, a small rack or a folded square of foil, cover, and cook at a steady simmer for 12 minutes. Steam gets between the shell and the membrane in a way boiling water does not, which is what makes them peel cleanly.
- 2
Chill them hard, then peel
Lift the eggs straight into a bowl of ice water and leave them 10 minutes, until they are cold through. Cooling them fast is what stops the yolks going chalky at the edge. Crack each shell all over on the counter, peel under a thin run of cold water, and pat the eggs dry.
- 3
Dress the avocado before anything else
Halve and pit the avocados and scoop the flesh into a mixing bowl. Add the lemon juice, the Dijon and a good pinch of salt straight away, while the cut surfaces are still bright green. The acid only protects the flesh it actually touches, so it goes in before anything else gets chopped.
- 4
Mash half, leave half
Press about half the avocado against the side of the bowl with a fork until it is a coarse paste, and leave the rest in rough chunks. That mashed half is the dressing, and it is where the creaminess comes from rather than from mayonnaise.
- 5
Fold in the eggs and season twice
Chop the cold eggs into rough half-inch pieces and add them with the chives and a good grind of pepper. Fold rather than stir, turning the mixture over on itself six or seven times, so the white stays in visible pieces. Taste, and expect to want more salt and more lemon than feels reasonable: the fat blunts both.
- 6
Serve it cold
Pile it onto toast, into lettuce cups or between two slices of bread, and finish with the herbs. If it has to wait, press plastic wrap flat onto the surface so no air reaches it, and keep it in the fridge.
Notes
Once the eggs are cooked and cold, the salad itself takes 10 minutes. Steam six or eight at the start of the week and this becomes a lunch you assemble rather than cook.
No steamer basket? A small metal rack or a crumpled square of foil holds the eggs clear of the water. Sitting them directly in an inch of simmering water works nearly as well.
For a firmer salad that holds its shape in a sandwich, use one avocado rather than two and add the tablespoon of mayonnaise or Greek yogurt.
A finely diced stalk of celery is the one addition that changes the texture rather than just the flavor. Add it with the eggs.
Nutrition Facts
4 servings · 167 g per serving
- Calories
- 238 kcal
% Daily Value*
- Total Fat
- 19.6 g25%
- Saturated Fat
- 3.7 g19%
- Sodium
- 287 mg12%
- Total Carbohydrate
- 9.9 g4%
- Dietary Fiber
- 6.9 g25%
- Sugars
- 1.2 g—
- Protein
- 8.8 g18%
Recipe from veggierecipes.blog
When it goes wrong
Troubleshooting
The whole bowl went brown within an hour
Air, and lemon juice that never reached the flesh that browned. The acid only protects surfaces it touches, so if you diced the avocado first and dressed it after chopping the eggs, every cut face was oxidizing the whole time. Dress it the moment it is open. For storage the surface is the entire problem: press plastic wrap flat onto the salad rather than lidding a container with an inch of air above it. Brown that does appear is harmless. Scrape it off.
It tastes like nothing, or just like avocado
Under-salted and under-acidified. Fat coats the tongue and mutes salt and sourness alike, and this salad is around fifteen percent fat by weight. A batch this size usually wants close to a teaspoon of fine salt and the full two tablespoons of lemon before it stops tasting like an ingredient. Taste it on a piece of bread rather than off the spoon, because the bread dilutes it again.
The shells took half the white with them
Too-fresh eggs, and no peeling technique beats that chemistry. Steam instead of boiling so the vapor can work in between shell and membrane, chill hard in ice water so the egg contracts away from the shell, and where you have the choice, cook eggs that have been in the fridge a week. Cracking the shell all over before you start, then peeling under running water, does the rest.
There is a gray-green ring around the yolks
Overcooked, then cooled too slowly. Sulfur from the white and iron from the yolk meet at the boundary and form ferrous sulfide, the same iron compound sold as a supplement, and it is harmless. Avoid it anyway, because it is the visible signal that the yolks have gone past creamy and are heading for chalky. Twelve minutes of steam and a fast ice bath is the whole prevention.
It turned into guacamole
Mashed too far, or folded too many times once the eggs went in. The salad depends on contrast: chunks of avocado that still hold an edge, pieces of white you can see, and a creamy base holding it together. Mash half and no more, then count your folds and stop at six or seven. A rubber spatula does less damage than a fork, which cuts as much as it turns.
It went watery in the fridge overnight
Usually the eggs. Eggs peeled while still warm, or left sitting in their ice bath for an hour, carry a film of water into the bowl that the avocado cannot absorb. Pat them dry before chopping. The other culprit is tomato or cucumber stirred through the batch, both of which start shedding liquid within about twenty minutes of meeting salt. Add those per portion, not to the bowl.
Before you serve
Serving & Storage
The most obsessive egg salad sandwich in the world is Japanese. The tamago sando sold in every convenience store there is nothing but egg salad on shokupan, the soft milk bread, crusts cut off, and it is treated with a seriousness the American deli version never gets. The lesson worth stealing is not the Kewpie mayonnaise, since this recipe uses none, but the construction: soft bread rather than crusty, cut crusts, and a filling laid thick enough to stand proud at the edges. An egg salad sandwich fails at the edges, where the bread is bare.
Beyond bread it goes on toast, where a seeded rye or a sturdy sourdough stands up to the weight better than plain white. It sits in leaves of little gem, butter lettuce or romaine hearts for something you eat with your hands. It works spooned onto thick cucumber rounds, rolled into a wrap, or piled on a bowl of warm rice with furikake and a spoon of chili crisp, which is a better lunch than it sounds. Sliced tomatoes with flaky salt alongside cover the acidity the salad is short of.
What does not work is worth saying plainly. Do not heat it, and in particular do not build it into a grilled sandwich or a melt: warm avocado turns bitter and slightly grainy, and the salad splits. It is a poor party dip, too thick to scoop without breaking a chip and visibly brown in an open bowl inside half an hour. And it cannot be frozen, because avocado thaws into water and gray fiber.
Making it ahead
The assembled salad does not keep well enough to be a meal prep dish, so prepare the components instead. Steamed eggs keep about a week in the fridge in their shells, and roughly five days peeled in a sealed container. Slice the chives at the same time. With the eggs cooked, cold and peeled, the salad is a ten-minute job, which is the version of make-ahead that works here. What you cannot do is mix a batch on Sunday for Thursday.
Storing leftovers
An airtight container with plastic wrap pressed flat against the surface, and eat it within two days. It still looks good at twenty-four hours and is still good to eat at forty-eight, though the color has dulled by then. Ignore the trick of burying the avocado pit in the bowl: it protects the flesh directly underneath it and nothing else. Since this is an egg dish, be strict about time out of the fridge. Two hours at room temperature is the limit, and one hour above 90°F, which covers most of the picnics this salad gets taken to.
Still wondering
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this avocado and egg salad gluten-free?
The salad is, and every ingredient in it is naturally gluten-free. The two things to check are the mustard, because a small number of brands are made with malt vinegar, which comes from barley, and whatever you serve it on.
Can I make a vegan version of this?
Not of this recipe, since it is egg salad and the eggs are most of it. The base does transfer, though. Avocado, lemon, Dijon, chives and salt folded through a drained can of roughly mashed chickpeas, or a block of firm tofu crumbled and pressed dry, gives the same sandwich filling in the same ten minutes. A pinch of kala namak, the sulfurous black salt, will even make it taste of egg.
How much does this make, and how do I scale it?
Four servings of about 165 g each. Scale on a ratio of one avocado to two eggs and keep the lemon in proportion, since that is what stops it browning as much as what seasons it. Above a double batch, mix it in two bowls and dress the second only when the first is gone: a big bowl has a big surface, and the surface is what goes brown.
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