Ok friends, today we’re making cured egg yolks. To cure egg yolks, you simply encase them in salt and sugar for four days to a week and then dry them out in the oven for a couple hours. The process is ridiculously easy, but it’ll make people think you’re a master chef. It’s also a great way to use up egg yolks when you’re only cooking with the whites! I made this batch with the unused yolks from my charcoal pavlova! No sense in wasting good egg yolks when you can easily turn them into something delicious.
Cured egg yolks look like gouda disguised as egg yolks and taste rich and almost cheesy. I actually think they’re a great cheese alternative, so if you’re dairy free and sad about it, you should definitely give this a try. Using cured egg yolks is simple: just grate or shave them onto anything you’d put cheese on! They last for about a month, so plan accordingly.
Things you can grate cured egg yolk onto/into include but are not limited to the following:
- Pizza
- Pasta
- Salad
- Eggs
- Mashed Potatoes
- Your mouth
Cured Egg Yolks:
Ingredients:
- 4 egg yolks (or as many as you want, but 4 fits nicely in my tupperware)
- 2 cups kosher salt
- 2 cups sugar
Directions:
- Mix salt and sugar together and put half of the mixture in a container that’ll easily fit in your fridge.
- Create four yolk sized indentations in the salt/sugar using the back of a spoon. Separate your egg whites and yolks and drop one yolk into each indentation.
- Gently cover the yolks with the rest of the salt and sugar, then seal it up and pop it in the fridge for anywhere from four days to a week.
- Once you pull it out of the fridge, carefully remove the yolks and rinse any remaining salt and sugar off them. Now place them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
- At this point you have a couple of options. One is to leave them in the oven with the heat off for a couple of days in order to allow them to dry out naturally. The other is to put them in the oven at the lowest temperature possible for a couple of hours. My oven’s lowest temperature is 170° Fahrenheit, so that’s what I went with. If yours goes down to 150° Fahrenheit, that works, too. The goal here is an opaque yolk that looks a bit like a hard cheese. For me, 2 hours was perfect, but this may be different for you.
