Run – don’t walk – to your nearest newsstand to pick up a copy of the April issue of Food Network Magazine. The cover alone will stop you in your tracks. It’s a perfectly beautiful yolk peeking through the hole of a perfectly toasted slice of bread and the word “Eggs!” screaming at you to buy the issue. From the “Editor’s Letter” to “Cooking Up the Cover,” this is certainly Food Network Magazine’s BIG EGG ISSUE!

The “Cooking Up the Cover” story talks about the process of selecting the egg-in-the-hole cover photo and, though there’s no recipe, it’s interesting to see how it landed there. There is also an “insider out-take” section which illustrates all that a food editor has to think about. The food editor for this magazine is Liz Sgroi.

Liz has been a great friend of the egg since her early days at the Hearst Publishing Co. when she was food editor of Quick & Simple magazine. Since one of my jobs with the American Egg Board is to keep in touch with the editors of magazines with food pages, I always kept Liz on my A-List of editor contacts. Her move to Food Network Magazine gave her an opportunity to be at the ground floor of a publication that is now regarded as one of the best culinary publications around.

I’ve been promoting eggs and egg recipe ideas for 40-years, so naturally I thought I have seen everything egg-wise. Until now. The magazine’s April BIG EGG ISSUE includes a bonus removable 7-page insert of 50 ideas to do with eggs, many of them altogether new to me and all of them terrific. I had lots of questions about how the feature came together and Liz answered them all. Here’s what she and the Food Network Test Kitchen staff said about it:

The insert booklet recipes were created by the genius developers at Food Network Kitchens – there were about 6 cooks working on the project. Many of the recipes they included are tried-and-true classics (like the egg-in-the-hole and the frittata), but many were inspired by dishes that the cooks have eaten in the past and wanted to recreate, plus egg dishes they’ve always wanted to try. The developers are all insanely creative, so the insert gives them a chance to play and come up with new combos. Liz told me that the Test Kitchen Director, Katherine Alford, said “Eggs are so cool, we could have done even more!”

The testing process is always very thorough – many of the egg recipes were tested 3 or 4 times to get them just right. Others were perfect on the first go. The test kitchens estimate that for this BIG EGG ISSUE they went through well over 20 dozen eggs, plus the food stylist used another 6 or more dozen for the spectacular photos. In fact, the stylist fried 2 dozen eggs just to get the perfect one that ended up in print! 

To celebrate the BIG EGG ISSUE, Liz and I had lunch together where we talked eggs for another two hours. And, look….that’s a picture of her poking into the perfectly poached egg – yup, another egg – that sat atop her warm pancetta vinaigrette-dressed escarole salad.  

Liz Sgroi…you go girl!

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