The Best Way To Eat Salt Cured Egg Yolks

If you've heard about salt cured eggs, you're probably wondering how you should serve them. The small, solid discs of dried and cured yolks are packed with umami flavor, and are sure to enhance almost any dish, from pasta to soup to salad. However, their flavor can be intense, so serving them in the proper way is essential. Adding a whole cured yolk into a dish would prove too salty or overwhelming. Instead, the food is best served as an accent, similar to white or black truffles or Parmesan cheese. Like those two foods, salt cured egg yolks are best served shredded or grated over dishes as a creamy, savory punctuation to your dish.

To properly apply this yolky topping, simply use a microplane or box grater to shred your solidified yolks over whichever dish you please. Grated yolks make the perfect addition to eggy pastas, such as Carbonara, which has a yolk based sauce. The cured yolks also make a great topping for ramen, adding in a complex, delicious component to the already umami rich soup. They can even add a rich nutty flavor to caramel sauce, transforming the yolks into a delicious, unconventional ice cream topping. 

It may seem like an intimidating task to prepare these little spheres of goodness but making them is actually quite simple. All you need is salt, sugar, and egg yolks. Curing your yolks is a great way to use discards from making dishes such as meringue, which only require whites. The exact proportions of salt to sugar vary based on individual recipes, but usually you'll need several cups of salt and several cups of sugar. 

You should then blend the salt and sugar to create a uniform mixture, and add seasonings of your choosing, such as pepper, herbs, or grated truffle. Then, pour your salt mix into a glass pan and form small divots into the layer of salt with either a spoon or an unbroken egg. After this, you'll add your yolks, cover them fully with more of the salt mixture, and place the dish in the fridge to cure for about a week.

Once your yolks are cured, rinse off the mixture and then bake them at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes (you can use an air fryer for this if it has a low enough temperature setting). This will ensure that your yolks are fully dry and will also kill any potential mold. Once fully cooked and cured, those yolks will keep in your fridge for about a month. In that time, you can shred off little peels of goodness on whatever food you serve.