We Made Chocolate Deviled Eggs. They Tasted Exactly Like You Would Expect
There are seemingly a million secret ingredients you could add to deviled eggs to make them unique and fun. Bacon is always appreciated, herbs add freshness, and Worcestershire sauce can amp up the umami in the dish. Naturally, these are all savory seasonings. But have you ever wondered if sweet ingredients could work in a deviled egg? Apparently someone in Ohio has because the state is responsible for giving the world chocolate deviled eggs.
As best as we can tell, the recipe was dreamed up by the mad scientists of the Ohio Poultry Association. They've been selling these sweet eggs from a booth at the Ohio State Fair since at least 2019. Other recipes we found for the dish online pointed back to the Poultry Association's original version. We're not going to lie: When we first heard about this, we were horrified. But then we thought, "Maybe it could actually work." After all, we told ourselves, eggs are hidden in a large number of chocolate desserts, including brownies, cakes, and pudding. It's possible that chocolate and eggs have secretly been a delicious flavor combo all along.
Either way, we knew we had to try chocolate deviled eggs for ourselves and report the results to our dear readers. Were they just stunt food designed to go viral on social media, or did they actually taste good? In our experience, it was a little of both.
Chocolate deviled egg ingredients
The procedure for this recipe is much the same as for regular deviled eggs: You hard-boil eggs, scoop out the yolks, mix them with creamy ingredients and seasonings, and stuff them back into the hollowed-out whites. Don't worry — there's no mayo in these dessert eggs. Instead of mayo, the creaminess quotient is supplied by heavy cream and cream cheese. The seasonings are unsweetened cocoa powder, powdered sugar, vanilla, and salt. We found that it took some elbow grease to get the ingredients to cohere into a smooth filling. We ended up using a hand mixer, but a food processor would work well too.
Even though we used the exact ingredient quantities recommended by the Ohio Poultry Association, our filling ended up being looser and runnier than we would have preferred. The recipe states you could adjust the amounts of sugar and heavy cream; if we make this again, we would cut the amount of cream. We tasted the filling and decided it needed extra sugar to balance out the bitterness of the cocoa, so we added a touch more. We transferred the filling into a plastic sandwich bag, snipped the corner, and used that to pipe the filling into our egg halves. A garnish of shaved chocolate and salt completed the dish.
The verdict: How did they taste?
We must say that the chocolate-egg yolk filling is delicious. The richness of the egg yolks, cream, and cream cheese work well with the cocoa powder, vanilla, and sugar — it tastes like a slightly less sweet take on chocolate cream cheese frosting. If you spread this mixture on a toasted piece of white bread or a slice of pound cake, it would be a great dessert. However, unfortunately, it doesn't work very well in the context of a deviled egg.
The hard-boiled egg whites were the big problem. The whites are where most of the stinky sulfur compounds in eggs live. We tried to cook our eggs as little as possible to minimize this (the yolks were just barely firm all the way through), but even so, the sulfurous taste and smell of the whites were very obvious. This wasn't really an issue in savory dishes, but it didn't go with the chocolate at all. The texture of the egg whites was also somewhat alarming. We were not used to the mouthfeel of eating large chunks of eggs in a dessert — in sweet dishes, eggs are typically mixed with other ingredients. The egg whites' slightly gelatinous, slimy consistency confused our palates.
Chocolate deviled eggs aren't exactly surprising — they taste like eggs with chocolate in the middle. If that sounds good to you, they're worth a try, but we don't think we'll be taking a second crack at this recipe any time soon.