Saturday, January 11, 2014 – After my whole “Merry Eggs-mas and Happy Hollandaise” pun card, I decided it was time to learn how to make my own eggs benedict. Plus, I learned how to make both Hollandaise sauce and poached eggs in cooking class, so eggs benedict was a natural extension.
The English muffin and the ham (actually canadian bacon) I just bought at the store. Because learning how to make English muffin would be a time consuming experiment, and you don’t make ham.
The poached eggs, though. Like the recipe said, I added a bit of vinegar to the water to help firm up the egg whites. When I dropped the egg into the pot, the egg immediately sunk to the bottom, and most of the egg whites spread out and shredded themselves apart. If I were to guess, it was the convection currents from the stove being too hot. Also, even though the egg yolks were nice and gooey, the egg whites came out a little on the firm side. (This was also probably the stove being too hot.)
The recipe for the Hollandaise sauce called for juice from 1 lemon. (But I halved the recipe, so it was juice from half the lemon.) I juiced half a lemon, then put about 80% of the juice in the beaten eggs. But that was way too much lemon. Clearly I need to use much less lemon juice next time. Also, when adding the butter, there was only enough residual heat to melt about half a tablespoon of butter. Not sure if I’m supposed to be using less butter or if I’m taking the eggs off the heat too soon.
Regardless, it was still delicious (if not overly lemony), and it looks awesome too.