My favorite brunch item is eggs benedict. I love the pillows of egg covered in the golden delicious goodness, sitting on its pedestal of English muffin.
I woke up this morning much earlier than expected (at 8 instead of like 10 or 11) especially for a Saturday, and could not fall back asleep because I knew I had to make my eggs benedict. I thought it was going to be an easy task, but as my fiance says, “you can’t judge an egg by its shell.”
You can watch my struggle on TikTok.
At first, I followed the recipe on Bon Appetit featuring Molly, one of my favorites from the OG crew, RIP. The recipe is meant for a crowd meaning that the poached eggs can be made in advance which I was super grateful for because I didn’t want to rush through poaching eggs after making my hollandaise sauce (hollandaise sauce tends to thicken up if you let it sit). I was also surprised by how different Molly’s directions were from my previous notions of poaching eggs. For instance, she says to strain the egg so that you don’t get the scraggly bits of egg white in your water – what a pro tip! I was so shocked when the whole egg white didn’t just drain straight through, but I guess it makes sense since eggs tend to maintain 80% of its shape. She also explained that a vortex isn’t really needed since you want to cook the egg gently – I’ve always used a vortex because the pros say it helps with the shape, which it does, but I didn’t do it this time and it still came out great!
The part that went all wrong was the hollandaise. I had a lot of trepidation before starting and knew that I needed to just plunge in. In retrospect, it might have been better if I listened to my gut more, but I wanted to be courageous. Also, now I can say I at least tried this method. I’m not blaming the BA recipe at all because there were a lot of variables that possibly went wrong. Since I was only cooking for 2 servings, I used a different recipe for the sauce so I can get the measurements for 2 (the BA recipe is for 12 servings and it’s difficult to halve 3 egg yolks…). The BA recipe uses a blender and is meant to be a quick way to do it. To be honest, I was using a really fancy blender which I didn’t know how to fully operate, so I may have also used the wrong blending setting. I also added in the melted butter faster than I probably should have. After blending for a bit, I saw that the sauce was not thickening like it should and upon inspection, I could see the butter still not combining into the sauce. This was my first time making hollandaise sauce so I didn’t know what to expect, but I figured that my sauce had “broken,” something I had heard people say so many times in cooking shows.
After scrapping the hollandaise, I went back to the drawing board and followed the bain-marie method and recipe from Spruce Eats which worked 1000% better. Once the sauce was done, it was just a matter of assembling everything. And voila!
Pingback: Ruthy Foody