Egg Salad Tartines with Smoked Salmon

Of course there were eggs for Easter. I usually make deviled eggs, but this year I decided to mix it up just a bit. The flavors here were the same as what you’d find in my deviled eggs, but the delivery took a different form. These tartines are from Ina, and I’ve always thought her egg salad topped with thinly sliced smoked salmon looked delicious. I thought about making them for the longest time. In fact, I thought about them for so long, I forgot which one of her books included the recipe. In the past, I used to search my cookbooks by pulling each one off the shelf and flipping to the index. I did that to find recipes I remembered or to get ideas for cooking with specific ingredients. That was the old way of searching. These days, I use Eat Your Books, which accomplishes the same thing with just the click of a mouse. You build a list of all of your books which you can then search for recipes or ingredients. The search result will show the book title that includes your search term and the list of ingredients in the recipe. It’s so much easier than the old way. I quickly found that the egg salad tartines are in Barefoot Contessa at Home. This recipe is also on the FoodNetwork site.

I wanted to find Ina’s recipe to see exactly how she made her version and to check the ratio of mayonnaise to egg, but I had to make a few additions of my own. Ina’s egg salad is very straightforward with just hard-boiled eggs chopped in a food processor, mayonnaise, whole-grain mustard, fresh dill, salt, and pepper. I wanted to add a couple of things that are always in my deviled eggs, so I included finely chopped cornichons and spring onions. I had some pretty, red, spring onions from the farmers’ market and wanted to make use of their flavor and color. For bread, I had just baked some sourdough baguettes which are even more fun to bake now that I have a proper baguette pan. I sliced a baguette and toasted the pieces before spreading them with the egg salad and topping it with smoked salmon. I wish I had cured my own salmon, but that’s something that remains on my to-try list.

I knew I was going to like this a lot, and I think I enjoyed it even more than my usual deviled eggs. The smoked salmon added savory, slightly salty bite to the egg salad. Another option would have been to slice some olives to use as a topping. I have a thing for the pickled element of cornichons with hard-boiled eggs, but I’m not sure how popular that is. Do you have a favorite ingredient for egg salad or deviled eggs?