Eggs Benedict (Poached Eggs and Hollandaise on English Muffins)

Variations

• Eggs Royale (Eggs Norwegian): smoked salmon in place of the ham. The commonest variation by far; the salmon's oil overlaps with the hollandaise, so add a little more lemon to cut it.
• Eggs Florentine: spinach instead, squeezed properly dry. The water in the spinach thinning the sauce is the only trap, so wilt it and wring it out by hand (blanching vegetables).
• Blackstone: bacon plus a slice of tomato. Close to the composition in this recipe's own hero photo, which comes with tomatoes alongside.
• Béarnaise from the same base: add tarragon and a shallot-vinegar reduction to the same emulsion and you have béarnaise, the sauce for steak. The method is identical (emulsions and pan sauces).
• Blender hollandaise: run the yolks and lemon in a blender and pour hot melted butter in through the top. Two minutes and almost impossible to break. The texture is a little heavier and a small quantity just spins past the blades — but it is a fine way to make it the first time.
• Poaching ahead: poach for three minutes, drop straight into iced water, and they keep a day in the fridge. Reheat for thirty seconds in hot water to serve. This is how you get brunch onto several plates at once.
• Instead of muffins: split a scone, or build it on crisp fried potato. It is a different family from a baked open sandwich like croque monsieur.
• Other egg dishes here: omelette and gyeranmari set eggs into a shape, shakshuka and menemen crack them into a sauce, and quiche bakes them into a custard. For brunch there are already pancakes and French toast.

Tips

• The order is fixed: sauce first, eggs last. Hollandaise will sit lukewarm for half an hour; a poached egg starts firming the second it leaves the water. Done the other way round, this dish fails every time.
• Hollandaise splits for exactly two reasons, heat and speed. Too hot and the yolk cooks into grains; butter poured in too fast overwhelms the emulsion and the fat floats out. Keep the bowl clear of the water and pour in a thread (emulsions and pan sauces).
• A split sauce is recoverable. In a clean bowl, whisk one fresh yolk (or a tablespoon of iced water) and dribble the broken sauce into it. You are rebuilding the emulsion from scratch, and it usually works.
• Clarifying the butter raises your success rate a lot. The water and milk solids in butter are what destabilise the emulsion. Those five minutes are the cheapest insurance in the recipe (dairy and heat).
• Use fresh eggs. An older egg has a thinner white that trails away into threads the moment it hits the water. This is one of the rare dishes where egg freshness shows up directly in the result (cooking eggs).
• Throw the loose white away. Sit each egg in a sieve, let the watery white run off, and poach what is left: you get a clean oval. More reliable than the whirlpool.
• No salt in the poaching water. Vinegar sets the white faster; salt does the opposite and loosens the protein so it spreads. Season on top at the end (salt and seasoning).
• Do not boil the water. About 90°C — bubbles from the base, surface almost still. A rolling boil tears the white apart (heat control).
• Drain the poached eggs. Skip that one step and water pools under the muffin and the sauce slides straight off it.
• Always toast the muffin. Two wet things are going on top of it; dry bread will not hold (browning).
• Do not crisp the bacon. Crunch is the wrong texture between a soft egg and a soft sauce, and streaky bacon's fat combines with the hollandaise into something cloying.
• Taste and adjust the lemon at the end. 150g of butter and three yolks are heavy left to themselves. Acid is the only ingredient that cuts through it (balancing flavour).
• Warm the plates. Hollandaise sets as it cools and a poached egg just becomes a lukewarm egg. You have about two minutes with this dish (serving temperature).
• Do not keep leftover hollandaise. It is barely-cooked yolk held warm; it is not a thing to store. Make only as much as you need.