Eggs flying off your TikTok app

rosemary
Sep 29
4 min read

"There is ultimately more shopping than cooking involved."

Tim Dowling / The Guardian

This lady's name is Alice Choi, a Korean American with a TikTok name of HIp Foodie Mom and she appears to have begun the latest craze - egg flights - in the TikTok foodie world, a craze that Tim Dowling of The Guardian tells us doesn't appear to be going away.

So what is it? Just in case you are interested. Well again Tim Dowling puts it best:

"Simply put, an egg flight is to hard-boiled eggs what a wine flight is to wine – a varietal sampling, presented in one sitting. Unlike devilled eggs, where the yolk is scooped out, mashed with mayonnaise and spices and piped back into its former cavity, the egg flight is just some eggs – most commonly three, in six upturned halves – with different stuff piled on top."

The version Alice Choi is holding in her hand there is mayonnaise, mustard and kimchi. No fancy piping, just stuff piled on willy nilly. A pretty basic version really.

I wrote about good old-fashioned Devilled eggs that Tim Dowling mentions, back in 2022 when I think they were beginning to come back into fashion. And high end chefs delight in doing exquisite looking things with them. It's a classic old hors d'œuvre, which used to be topped with caviar and served on silver platters, or at the very least, very fancy plates. They looked elegant and refined and there would generally be just one kind which was the speciality of the house. And you would only get one or two, not a flight. Well maybe those old-fashioned hors d'œuvre trolleys would have had a couple.

When they came back into fashion you got a whole range of celebrity chefs and restaurateurs coming up with new ways of doing them - much more than mayonnaise and mustard - like Ottolenghi here with his Devilled eggs with tangerine rayu.

Serious Eats' chief J. Kenji López-Alt presented 9 in-your-face devilled egg variations, and several other professionals have pitched in with their creations.

However, when I began looking for photographs of egg flights I could not find one single professional site or chef - celebrity or otherwise - who had tried to up the ante as it were from a social media sensation. Not even the mid-range bloggers like Nagi Maehashi or supermarket magazines, or Jamie Oliver. Maybe they haven't cottoned on as yet.

Egg flights, still seem to be confined to TikTok and Instagram foodie influencers in all their messy and ridiculous iterations. This is just one which I'm showing, because honestly it just looked so awful - I mean baked beans? This is the very opposite of elegant devilled eggs topped with caviar.

I also don't understand how this became such a hit because I watched Alice Choi's original TikTok post all six and a half minutes of it, and honestly it was boring. Somehow I expected more from something that has created such a massive craze.

Tim Dowling was, of course, scathing in an amusing way in his article, but that's what he's paid to do I guess:

"Would-be egg-flight makers are encouraged to get creative and try new things, but in practice the discipline seems to involve a lot of imitation, in keeping with the average TikToker’s overarching definition of originality: the exact same thing, but with me doing it”

His comment that more shopping is involved than cooking is certainly true, when you watch these young men and women dobbing stuff on top of a halved boiled egg. The variety is massive. But then we probably all have a selection of stuff in our fridge and on our pantry shelves that could be used - just think of the variety of condiments, sauces, sprinkles and so on that probably everyone has at home. And there seems to be nothing that can't be tried - peanut butter and jelly was one idea.

Tim Dowling again on the theory behind it all:

"the closest thing we may ever have to an Egg Flight Theory: the ideal egg requires something creamy, topped by something tangy, topped by something sour and/or crunchy."

Which is probably not so different from Ottolenghi's advice about salads that I wrote about recently.

Tim Dowling tried half a dozen examples saying of this one - the classic - that:

"The Classic is the most basic combo to follow that formula and it’s easily the best: mayo, dijon mustard and a slice of dill pickle. That’s it – stop there. It’s essentially a lazy person’s devilled egg, and, honestly, it cannot be improved upon."

Not very pretty of course , but then this is not necessarily what is the real attraction of the craze. I suspect it's just the fun of trying weird and wonderful things on the blank canvas of half a hard-boiled egg.

That said some of them do try to make them attractive. It is a flight after all - i.e. a sampling and probably one person is not going to eat their way through six half eggs - even nutritionists say this might well be too many eggs to eat in one go. So something to prepare for guests - just remember to put a blog of mayonnaise under your egg half, to stop it wobbbling all over the place and dumping the stack of stuff on top on your carefully chosen wooden platter.