Eggs Benedict

It’s the weekend. You don’t have to go to work, and you have a little extra time on your hands. it’s time for a great breakfast. It’s time for eggs Benedict!

The classic brunch food of poached eggs, ham, and English muffins all doused with rich Hollandaise sauce is daunting to some, but with a little science, temperature control, and the right thermometers you can turn out a breakfast of eggs Benedict that is as good—or better!—than anything you’ve had in restaurants. We’ll use the Thermapen^® ONE to make our Hollandaise a cinch, and the ChefAlarm^® to take the guesswork out of poaching the eggs.

Poached eggs: rewarding, elegant, and finicky

According to culinary lore, the famous toque blanche (white hat) worn by chefs is supposed to have 101 pleats, with each pleat representing one of the 101 methods the chef is supposed to know for preparing eggs. While this may be an exaggeration in actual fact, it goes to show something interesting about eggs: this common—even pedestrian—ingredient can be elevated to greatness. Further, eggs can be both easy and surprisingly fussy to cook. If you’d like to know more about egg cookery, anatomy, and techniques, read our post about boiled eggs.

Poaching problems

Poaching eggs—barely simmering them out of their shells in a shallow bath of water—is a beautiful method of cooking eggs that, if done correctly, results in creamy-rich yoks and tender whites. Once you learn to poach correctly, you’ll do it all the time. But there is a small learning curve that we hope to help you through.

Wispy ghost strands

Making poached eggs that are visually appealing is tricky, because of the way egg whites age. As eggs sit in the fridge, the thick albumen partially breaks down, leaving part of it watery and thin. When you slide these eggs into your simmering water you end up with those ghosty, wispy strands of egg white that cling to the egg and float around in your water. These aren’t bad, per se, but they get in the way of nice presentation and are an annoyance when cooking.

Overcooking

Of course, whispy strands are hardly the main problem when poaching eggs. No, the main problem is usually overcooking. If you end up with a hardened yolk, you may just as well have made hard-boiled eggs, a dish with maybe only half the flair of poached eggs. Getting the whites firm enough without hardening the yolk is what scares most people off from poaching eggs.

Egg poaching solutions

To fix the ghost wisps, we can try to get the freshest eggs possible so that the white will not have had as much time to break down. But beyond that, we can use the wateriness of the white to our advantage. Crack the eggs one at a time into a coarse strainer (like a kitchen spider) before placing them in your poaching liquid. The watery part of the white will strain through, leaving only the thick part of the white that will hold its shape while poaching.

To be sure that we end up with runny yolks, we need to control the temperature. Use a ChefAlarm and a pot clip to keep an eye on the water temperature. Set the high-temp alarm to 180°F (85°C), as recommended by TastingTable.com. This temperature ensures that the proteins in the white (the Ovalbumin, Ovotransferrin, and Lysozyme) all set up. And while that temperature is hot enough to set the yolk—which starts to set at 158°F (70°C)—it will not do so quickly, especially when the yolk is insulated by the white. (Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking, pp 75-85.)

When your water gets within your target temperature range, adjust the heat so that the temperature remains constant. You may want to watch the temperature for a minute or two before adding the eggs to make sure your heat level is steady. 2 By actually monitoring the temperature, you can be sure you’re not overcooking the eggs. The ChefAlarm gives you this advantage by allowing you to monitor the temperature in real-time.

Hollandaise sauce problems

Traditionally, Hollandaise is made by slowly cooking egg yolks with a little water until they achieve a ribbon-like stage, then whipping clarified butter in a few drops at a time to create an emulsion. The cooking prepares the yolks to create a better emulsification and a thicker sauce, and must be done carefully. The process is daunting, arduous, and, for those with little practice, often ends in failure.

Failure can result from many errors, including bad emulsification—which is easy to do. Add the butter too fast or don’t whip it fast enough, and your emulsion will break, creating a greasy, useless liquid.

Failure also comes from over or undercooking the yolks, resulting either in a lumpy scrambled-egg sauce, or something too thin to really work with.

And, of course, there is the problem of your rotator cuff. That much whipping with a whisk is hard, and not at all the reason you woke up early on weekend.

Hollandaise sauce solutions and tips

J. Kenji López-Alt has demonstrated an ingenious solution to all of these problems, and it happens to have a great thermal component! He recommends inverting the cooking. Rather than cooking eggs and adding butter, we’re going to cook butter and then add it to the cold eggs. Let’s look at the method.

Kenji Recommends putting the egg yolks with the water, lemon juice, and seasonings in an immersion blender cup, then adding hot butter while whizzing the immersion blender. This solves all the problems. First, the blender is better at whisking than you are, so it is going to get the emulsification right, without wearing out your shoulder. But more importantly, adding the hot butter in a slow stream behaves much like tempering a custard with hot milk: the eggs cook while simultaneously colling the butter as it goes in. We’ll use 200°F (93°C) butter, which we can measure with a Thermapen. The more accurate we can make our temperature, the better. This temperature is hot enough to cook the yolks, but not hot enough to curdle them.

This inverted cooking method also allows you to make the Hollandaise sauce in about 45 seconds, once the butter is hot enough, which is a pretty neat trick. It is foolproof, as long as you use your Thermapen to make sure your butter is at the right temperature.

Nothing says comfort and joy like a hot plate of rich, creamy eggs Benedict! With the help of temperature control, you really can make a classic dish that is usually reserved only for high-end restaurants in your very own kitchen. Keep your water at 180°F (82°C) to poach your eggs perfectly and invert the cooking of your Hollandaise by getting your butter to 200°F (93°C) and you’ll have flawless results.

And, if you want to level up your eggs even further, try modifying the recipe. Maybe use browned butter in the Hollandaise. Maybe switch out the main protein. Ham is wonderful, but it’s not the only thing that you can fill the Benedict canvas with. Other great ideas include thin-sliced smoked salmon or even leftover beef tenderloin—if there is such a thing in your kitchen! The possibilities are endless and the results are fantastic.

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References

Sarah R Labensky, et al.,  On Cooking: A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals

J. Kenji López-Alt, Foolproof Poached Eggs Recipe, and Foolproof 2-Minute Hollandaise Recipe on SeriousEats.com

Jake Cohen, Eggs Benedict: Master the king of breakfast dishes on TastingTable.com

Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking