Caviar Egg Salad Amuse-Bouche

(serves 8)
The combination of the intense savoury flavour and crunchy explosion of caviar just can’t be beat, but caviar can be a tad salty. In this recipe, this saltiness is perfectly balanced by the mild taste of egg salad to make the perfect amuse-bouche. There are just 5 simple ingredients, making this little package of tastiness incredibly easy to make. You can easily scale it up to serve several dozen guests if you need a dazzling canapé for a party.        

Ingredients

1. Caviar (1 bottle, 80g)
2. Eggs (4)
3. Shallots (1)
4. Brioche (8 mini slices)
5. Mayonnaise

Preparation

1. Hard boil 4 eggs (i.e. 12 minutes or more). Allow the eggs to cool in cold water and then de-shell them. You can boil the eggs anytime before and keep them in the fridge.
2. Put the each egg through a wire egg slicer three times. On the first pass, slice the egg as per normal but hold on to the ends of the eggs to keep the egg together.
3. On the second pass slice the eggs lengthwise. It will be harder to keep the eggs together so do the slicing carefully.
4. For the third pass you also slice the egg lengthwise but after rotating them 90 degrees. Hold the slicer over a large bowl to catch the falling bits as the egg will basically fall apart after you are done. The idea is to end up with little cubes of egg white. The yolk will disintegrate but that’s fine.
5. Finely (and I mean finely) dice one shallot. You can use a quarter of an onion if you don’t have shallots.
6. Add 2 heaped T of mayonnaise, the diced shallot, 0.5t sugar and a generous sprinkle of pepper to the diced egg and mix until the yolk has melted into the mayonnaise.
7. Add half the caviar to the egg salad and mix some more. Place the bowl into the fridge for about an hour.
8. Divide the caviar egg mixture onto the brioche. The brioche can be lightly toasted, or left untoasted if fresh.
9. Decorate each amuse-bouche with the remaining caviar and serve while cold.

Notes

• Caviar is not as expensive a delicacy as you might think, all you need to do is use a caviar made from a fish other than sturgeon. The cheaper varieties taste perfectly fine and in any case you might not want to use top grade caviar as a flavouring ingredient. The bottle I used (pictured right) was made from herring roe and has a retail price of under ten dollars, as will many other varieties.   
• Besides brioche you can use any number of other things as the base. Be it a pastry or bread, just make sure it is not of the salty type. The Blini (essentially a mini pancake, second photo) or a Yorkshire Pudding are some alternatives.
• The amount of caviar you reserve for decoration will determine the colour of your amuse bouche. If you mix the whole bottle of caviar in you will get a darker look as per the Blini photo.
• For some colour you can add some chopped chives. The stark green specks will make the amuse-bouche look even more attractive. I really should have done that for the photo.
• In case you were wondering, no that is not a giant ball of caviar in the top photo. It’s an optical illusion. It looks like a large slice of bread on a regular plate but its actually a slice of a mini brioche loaf on a small plate.
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