Skip to main content
Dessert

Egg Balls

Egg Balls are small boiled egg spheres made from boiled eggs and a raw yolk, seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 to 12 minutes.

  2. Place them in cold water until cool.

Shape and cook

  1. Remove the yolks and mash them smoothly with the raw egg yolk.

  2. Add salt and cayenne, then roll into small balls.

  3. Boil the balls for 2 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide the main body of the balls, with the yolks setting into a firm, mashable base.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the mashed yolks together so the balls hold their shape.

The step that matters

Mashing the yolks smoothly. Lumps left in the mashed yolk stay visible and crumble when rolled. Mashing until smooth, with the raw yolk worked in, gives an even texture that holds together during the short boil.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More egg balls recipes

for Soup 46Bacon 7Mock Turtle 4 See all 90 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes