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Have a grill? Put an egg on it. Really. An outdoor alternative to hard-boiled eggs, grilled eggs are a great side dish to serve at a cookout, and they’re a perfect topper for a fresh summer salad. They’re also ridiculously easy to make: you just put a raw egg, in the shell, on the grill for about 10 minutes. Then it’s done.
“For the most part, whatever you can cook on the stove or in the oven, you can cook on the grill,” says Kyle Hopkins, a grilling enthusiast in Kansas City, MO, who introduced me to grilled eggs.
Now for some disclosure: Kyle is my husband and he came upon grilled eggs somewhat by accident—and definitely inebriated.
That was a few summers ago when our chickens (RIP) were giving us six eggs a day and we were always looking for new ways to use them. And unless there’s three feet of snow on the ground or hurricane-like conditions, when Kyle cooks, it’s on the Weber or the Big Green Egg. So, one evening, as he was working his way through a six pack and letting some pork chops rest, he placed a few eggs directly on the grill grates, put the lid on, and left it alone for about 10 minutes to see what would happen.
To our surprise, the eggs were perfectly cooked and slightly smoky, with semi-soft yolks. They even had grill marks, but not where you’d expect. While the shells got a little darker (and some got spotty) each egg had two small spots on the white where it had made contact with the hot grates that were only visible once the shell had been peeled.
We split those first grilled eggs over salads and never looked back. Now, whenever we have the grill going, we throw a few eggs on at the end. Not only are they more flavorful than hard-boiled eggs, they’re a pretty impressive backyard party trick. And unlike smoked eggs, which take at least two hours to cook, grilled eggs are done in 6 to 14 minutes, depending how jammy you like your yolk.
There’s always room for error when grilling. No matter how you cook eggs, it’s easy to overdo it. But unlike hard-boiling, if an egg on the grill gets too hot—either from being too close to the fire or cooking too long—the shell will crack right open. This doesn’t make the egg inedible, but the white along the crack will get a little rubbery. Like hard-boiled eggs, grilled eggs will continue to cook once removed from the heat, so they should go in an ice bath for a few minutes, which also makes them easier to peel.
If you already have a fire going, there’s really no reason not to try grilled eggs. And until this whole thing catches on, you can even pretend it was your own drunken idea.
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