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How To Make My Chef-Husband's Best-Ever Egg Salad Sandwich
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Egg salad is one of those foods I've always wanted to love but just...Don't. I'm honestly not even sure when my issue with it began. I'm not anti-egg. I love deviled eggs and hard-boiled eggs in salade niçoise and cobb salad. I even love chicken salad and tuna salad, but for some inexplicable reason, I've always been freaked out by egg salad.
Something about the look of it just doesn't appeal to me, and I would choose any other crustless sandwich on a tiered tea tray if given the choice. Yet, despite my qualms with egg salad, I recently found myself asking my chef-husband Luke to make me his version of the best egg salad sandwich to see if he could change my mind.
With an abundance of eggs on hand the day after Easter, it seemed like the perfect time for the challenge. Here's what happened when I followed him into the kitchen to document his attempt.
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Ingredients for My Chef-Husband's Egg Salad SandwichLuke's go-to salad ingredientsKelli Acciardo Venner
The shopping list for Luke's best-ever egg salad started out short and sweet: white bread, mayonnaise, fresh dill, Dijon mustard, smoked paprika, eggs and salt.
However, when rummaging around in our fridge, he saw a tray of pickled veggies we had with dinner the other night and decided to use up the pickles and green beans because eggs and beans are a great pair. He also grabbed a jar of capers to add another layer of briny tang.
Related: How to Avoid the Dreaded Green Ring Around Your Hard-Boiled Egg Yolks, According to a 5th Generation Chicken Keeper
Chef Luke egg salad tip #1: work with what you haveKelli Acciardo Venner
How to Make My Chef-Husband's Best-Ever Egg SaladTo cook the eggs, Luke brought a large pot of salted water to a roaring boil, added the eggs and cooked them for 7 minutes. When the timer went off, he plunged the eggs into an ice bath waiting nearby to stop the cooking process.
Then he started peeling. "Let me show you the easiest way to peel eggs," he said, flipping on the cold water and placing a colander in the sink. "An egg has a top and a bottom and the bottom has a little divot. Simply tap the bottom on the counter to break the shell, then peel under cold running water and it will come right off."
The cracked divet of the eggKelli Acciardo Venner
I watched as the shells slid right off, which was indeed the easiest way to peel an egg that I had ever witnessed.
Luke's genius egg-peeling hackKelli Acciardo Venner
Once the eggs were all peeled, he quartered them and tossed them into a bowl with the minced pickles, capers and dill, and then sliced the green beans into small coins and tossed those in too.
It's important to note he used less green beans than pickles. "Capers are pretty dry," he tells me, "but too many pickled veggies will overpower the eggs."
Related: The Best Way to Make Smooth, Fluffy, Never-Ever Lumpy Deviled Egg Filling
Luke's egg salad ingredients ready to be dressedKelli Acciardo Venner
After everything was chopped, he got to work on his dressing. He added a few heaps of mayo and a small jar of Dijon mustard to a bowl, but then he decided to add a bit of hot sauce, too, "for some extra umami."
Mayo, mustard and hot sauce dressing for egg saladKelli Acciardo Venner
After mixing in a few splashes of hot sauce, he added a few spoonfuls of the dressing to the eggs. "The key is not to overdress," he said. "That's why we left the eggs a little chunky. We want our egg salad to be lightly bound by the mayo dressing. We don't want pulverized eggs."
The perfect egg salad consistencyKelli Acciardo Venner
Using a spatula, he mixed and chopped the egg salad together a few more times until it was creamy, silky and well combined. Then it was time to assemble the sandwiches.
Luke placed 6 slices of white bread on a cutting board and spread a thin layer of egg salad on the first two slices. After that, he tapped a healthy dusting of sweet smoked paprika onto the egg salad.
Smoked paprika egg saladKelli Acciardo Venner
He found some leafy green lettuce that needed to be used up and placed a few leaves on top of the egg salad, then topped the lettuce with 2 more slices of bread.
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Little gem lettuces for a bit of greenKelli Acciardo Venner
He repeated these same steps with the remaining egg salad and bread, then patted everything into place and sliced the crusts off the sandwich. The final touch? Slicing the sandwich in half diagonally and adding a fancy toothpick to hold everything together.
Egg salad sammies ready for de-crusting and slicingKelli Acciardo Venner
My Honest Thoughts on My Chef-Husband's Egg Salad SandwichEven though I had my doubts about this sandwich, it was honestly delicious. I love pickles, so the pops of pickled veggies sealed the deal for me and the spicy mayo-mustard dressing hit all the high notes. Bites of creamy, chunky egg salad were complemented by cool crisp lettuce leaves and I finished my first half without hesitation. I've gotta say that the game-changing ingredient was the smoky paprika that was laced throughout the sandwich. That added dimension of flavor really took this sandwich to the next level.
While egg salad may never be as high on my list of sandwich requests as Luke's famous chicken clubs, paninis and BLTs, I thoroughly enjoyed this sammie on a warm spring day with a chilled glass of rosé. It's a perfect sandwich for post-Easter lunches, Kentucky Derby parties and spring picnics.
Related: 10 Smart Ways to Save Money on Eggs
Chef Luke's best-ever egg salad sandwichKelli Acciardo Venner
Chef Luke's Best Egg Salad TipsAdjust your egg time if desired. Luke likes a slightly runny 7-minute egg but for firmer hard-boiled eggs, cook them for a full 10 minutes.
Use a colander for a shell basket. Cracked shells aren't great for your garbage disposal and a colander or bowl will collect them so they don't pass through when you're peeling the eggs.
Don't overdress the salad. Nobody likes a wet egg salad, so err on the side of caution when it comes to dressing. You can always add more if you need it.
Make sure your smoked paprika is sweet. As you can see, Luke was very liberal with his paprika dusting and spicy smoked paprika would be way too bold here. Look for sweet "dulce" smoked paprika; his favorite is La Dalia Sweet Smoked Paprika from Spain, which you can buy on Amazon or La Tienda.
Buttermilk white bread is best. The soft and ever so slightly tangy bread is what Luke prefers to use, but if you can't find it another soft fresh white bread will work.
Always cut your crusts off. According to Luke, egg salad sandwiches are the quintessential tea sandwiches. He thinks the look better sans crusts and stacked in double-decker form with a fancy toothpick to keep everything in place.
Gold pearl toothpicks FTWKelli Acciardo Venner
Up next:
Related: My Chef-Husband Made Me the World's Best Breakfast Sandwich and My Mornings Are Forever Changed
Japanese Egg Salad Sandwich Recipe
If there's one tip I feel confident sharing about going to Japan, it's that your first meal shouldn't be at some iconic sushi place or secret yakitori spot only chefs seem to know about: It should be at 7-Eleven. Between the jet lag from the long flight messing up your sense of reality [if you're traveling from the U.S.], the flashing lights, and the crowds, the first 24 hours in a place like Tokyo risk feeling like an urban fun house. The Japanese version of the famous convenience store, where you can get canned iced coffee that rivals any pricey cold brew in the States, crispy karaage, as well as bento boxes, makes the transition a little easier. And then there's the egg salad sandwich.
After a lifetime getting them in school lunches, I never believed something as simple as an egg sandwich could be so perfect. But when I ate my first ever Japanese 7-Eleven iteration at 10 p.M. While sitting in my hotel room after a bumpy flight across the Pacific, when I was almost certain I was in the middle of a waking dream, I knew then that I was going to fall in love with Japan.
This sandwich, made with a creamy, yolk-heavy salad whipped up and served alongside a few spare chunks of whites on fluffy milk bread, stands out thanks to one special ingredient: Kewpie mayo. Why we Americans settle for lesser mayos, I'll never know; the yolk-only and vinegar mayo just hits different, as the kids say. It hit so different that when I got back home, more than the little dried fishes I sampled in a market in Kyoto, or the most perfect Negroni I've ever had, most of all, I couldn't stop daydreaming about that sandwich.
Photo by Antonis Achilleos / Food Styling by Ana Kelly / Prop Styling by Lydia PursellI make egg salad on a somewhat regular basis. So I thought, why not try to re-create that flavor I had on my first night in Tokyo? Thankfully, I'm part of a CSA that sends me too many eggs each week, and I'd raided the shelves of a market near my house, buying up as much Kewpie mayo as I could; my problem was the bread. I had tried several bakeries and came close to giving up, when one day, as I was browsing my local farmers market, I found it — perfect Japanese milk bread from the Lost Bread Co. In Philadelphia.
As I got to work, I could tell the first batch was a duller yellow, meaning I needed to limit the involvement of egg whites in the salad. About four batches in, I started to worry. The 7-Eleven salad had a creamy texture that I couldn't quite achieve. Was I whipping too hard? Was I not using enough mayo? Around this time was when I first started trying to track down somebody, anybody, connected with the company, but I kept coming up against dead ends. The few replies I did get were friendly, polite people in Japan who told me they couldn't help. I thought of asking a friend who lives in Tokyo to just go buy a sandwich and read off the ingredients to me, but that's when I started realizing I was betraying the spirit of the endeavor. This was about remembering something, so I kept working, making batches, and inviting over whoever I could to eat egg salad outside on my roof.
Finally, I reached a point of my testing where I was close but still missing something that I couldn't put my finger on — all I could hit on was the Kewpie mayo and that extra tang. I needed to smooth that out, and I remembered a friend telling me that the reason his Italian grandmother tossed some sugar in her sauce was because the canned tomatoes she bought had a tanginess that the version from her homeland didn't have. So, borrowing a little logic from my friend's nonna, I sprinkled a bit of sugar, mixed it in, and that was it. You can't beat the real thing, of course, but until I can get back to Japan and walk into a fluorescent-lit convenience store after a long flight and purchase a sandwich as my first meal, this homemade version that I spent a summer working and reworking into my own thing will do just fine.
Irish Egg Salad Sandwiches Recipe
You can be sure you had these Irish egg salad sandwiches growing up in Ireland.
Irish salad sandwiches have been made by nearly every Irish housewife over the past five decades. Sometimes called egg and onion sandwiches, or egg and tomato sandwiches, these triangular sandwiches may or may not include lettuce.
I include lettuce in my version but trust me, there is no right or wrong way to make a salad sandwich. It's totally up to you whether you like more egg than tomato, or salad cream rather than mayonnaise to mix the filling.
Subscribe to IrishCentralMade for get-togethers big and small, these are a staple of quick entertaining menus in Ireland.
Many a plate of salad sandwiches has been whipped together to bring to a funeral gathering or wake, or for a family Christening, Communion or Confirmation celebration.
Hotels often serve these sandwiches as a light nibble at the end of wedding celebrations.
Mrs. Doyle's diagonalsThese are the sandwiches Mrs. Doyle made famous when she said ….
"They're diagonals!"
Mrs. Doyle is a TV character from the brilliant comedy Father Ted.
An ever-diligent housekeeper, Mrs. Doyle made sandwiches by the dozen, cut in diagonals, and served with aplomb to bishops and parishioners alike. Who can forget her urging????
"Ah, go on, go on, go on! You'll have one"
Never refuse a diagonal from Mrs. Doyle. She's mashed eggs by the dozen and carefully removed top crusts to make the most delicious Irish salad sandwiches ever!!!!
Irish style egg sandwiches cut into diagnols!
Pregnancy cravings for salad sandwichesMy yearning for salad sandwiches was reignited when I was pregnant with my triplets. My mother came over from Ireland to help me towards the end of my pregnancy, and one day she made me salad sandwiches for lunch.
I had forgotten how delicious this mix of egg, tomato, onion, and lettuce can be. I was hooked. I ate my mom's diagonals by the dozen until my trio was born. Perhaps that's why my little girl loves these sandwiches for lunch.
I'm still known to whip up a batch for a girls-only lunch.
How do you like to eat egg sandwiches? With chips or salad?
Sandwich sizeNow, Irish sandwiches are far thinner than their American counterparts.
The old saying goes that everything is bigger and better in America. Sandwiches fit the bigger bill, but maybe not better. Equal and different in deliciousness is how I will judge this taste contest.
I'll never forget my first American workday lunch at the hospital canteen in Elmira, New York.
I ordered a sandwich at the deli counter, expecting a one-inch high Irish sandwich, only to be astounded by the doorstep size mountain that appeared before me.
I don't think I finished a quarter of that sandwich. I quickly learned to order a half sandwich for lunch in the hospital canteen.
These salad sandwiches would fit the category of tea sandwiches in America.
Irish egg salad sandwich recipeWhat ingredients are need for Irish style egg sandwiches?
IngredientsLet's start by preparing the filling for these sandwiches. It's basically mashed hardboiled egg with tomatoes, shredded lettuce and diced green onions.
Ripe sweet tomatoes for your egg salad sandwiches.
It's important to scoop the pulp and seeds out of the tomatoes and only use the outer flesh.
The seeds and pulp making the filling too wet and watery, so I halve my tomatoes and use a teaspoon to scoop out the tomato innards.
In the picture above you can see how juice starts collecting in the scooped-out tomato shell. I turn the half tomato shells upside down to drain before I dice them.
Diced up tomatoes for your egg salad sandwiches.
Dice the tomato flesh into small 1/2 cm size pieces.
I used 2 cocktail tomatoes which are similar in size to Irish tomatoes. One Roma tomato will work very well for this recipe. They tend to be more fleshy than other tomatoes so just perfect for making this filling.
No big junks needed for these sambos. Just small little pieces.
Cutting up spring onions, fine, for your egg salad sandwiches.
Slice the green onions very thinly.
I only use the lower white portions, and stop where they get leafy and turn dark green, about 1/2 to 2/3's way up the stalk.
Cutting up your lettuce for egg salad sandwiches.
Next shred the lettuce.
I use Butter lettuce since this was the type of lettuce I knew as a child in Ireland. It's sold in American grocery stores as "living" lettuce.
This lettuce is softer and less crunchy than Romaine or Iceberg lettuce. If you prefer the crunchier texture, then use one of these lettuces.
But I stick to Butter lettuce, to make sandwiches like I knew as a child.
All the delicious fresh ingredients for your egg salad sandwiches in a bowl.
Next, it's time to mix all the filling ingredients together.
Place the mashed egg, diced tomatoes, shredded lettuce and diced green onion on a plate and mix it with the mayonnaise.
Many Irish cooks use salad cream instead of mayonnaise. This is an egg emulsion like mayonnaise but with the addition of vinegar and mustard, and a few secret spices only known to Heinz and the makers of Chef salad cream.
Egg salad sandwiches mix!
It's very important to season the filling mixture with salt and pepper.
I don't use much salt when I cook, but trust me, this filling needs some added salt.
Fluffy white bread for your egg salad sandwiches.
Next, it's time to butter the bread. You can choose not to butter the bread, but in Ireland, salad sandwich bread is always buttered.
When preparing the bread, always take two slices and open them so that two matching sides are buttered.
I remember buttering a whole slice pan the wrong way as a child. I just dipped in and buttered the upper side of every slice, instead of taking the slices in pairs and opening them for a perfect match. We learn by our mistakes!
My mom made topsy turvy sandwiches that day, but hey, nothing has to be perfect in life.
How do you cut your egg salad sandwiches.
Next, divide the filling in two. Spread it over one buttered slice of bread from each pair of slices.
Once you place the top slice on each sandwich, use a bread or serrated knife to remove the top crust. Then cut the sandwich into four triangles, with two diagonal cuts.
In Ireland, I would remove all the crusts, since our sliced bread is much larger than in America. Sliced pan is bigger in Ireland, and I will dare to say much, much better than the American sandwich bread. It's a lot less sweet. Eliminating all the crusts on an Irish sandwich doesn't reduce each triangular section to minuscule size as it does in America.
I leave the crusts on in America. I used a country white sliced loaf of bread for these sandwiches, and the crusts are very soft.
And there you have it, Irish salad sandwiches.
They're delicious served with chips. I only had American barbecue chips for my photoshoot, but my all-time favorite is a packet of Tayto cheese and onion crisps with an Irish salad sandwich. Yum-meee!
The finished egg salad sandwiches Irish style... In triangles, of course!
And don't forget a cuppa tea to enjoy with your lunch.
These little sandwiches are a perfect addition to any afternoon tea menu. These are always the first tea sandwiches I choose when enjoying an afternoon tea treat.
Here's the printable recipe:The finished product: Egg salad sandwiches Irish style served with potato chips.
IngredientsStart by preparing the filling for these sandwiches.
Halve the tomatoes, scoop out the seeds and pulp, and discard. Dice the outer tomato flesh into 1/2 cm size pieces.
Slice the green onions very thinly.
Mash the hard-boiled eggs.
Shred the lettuce leaves thinly.
Mix the mashed hard-boiled egg, diced tomatoes, green onions, lettuce and mayonnaise.
Season the filling with salt and pepper to taste.
Butter each pair of bread slices on the touching, matching sides.
Divide the filling in two and spread over the buttered side of two bread slices. Top each sandwich with its paired buttered bread slice.
Cut away the top crust of each sandwich. Divide into four triangles by slicing each sandwich with two crossing diagonal cuts.
Arrange on a sandwich plate and serve with hot tea and a side of chips or crisps.
Happy sandwich-making! Slán agus beannacht, (Goodbye and blessings)
*Irish American Mom Mairead Geary came to America for one year 20 years ago. She now lives with her husband and children in Kentucky and is proud to be an American citizen. Read more on her blog here.
*Originally published in 2017, updated in May 2025.
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