Just a completely velvety finish for my Chefs day off 10am breakfast. I mean, check this shiz-nizzle out would you! Just go on and feast your eyes first on today's play on the old favourite classic brunchie item; Eggs Benedict.
Eggs Benedict, here's what comprised mine today. Grilled rashers of honey cured middle bacon, sauteed English baby spinach leaves, poached free range eggs, tiger bread toasted in the pan juices (all that lovely bacon fat just adds so much crunchy goodness to each side of the bread as it sucks it all up and goes lovely and crispy, to hell with the plain old toasting method! Finished with my lovely hollandaise sauce, chopped chives, sword fighting chives and on the side you see some finished button mushrooms and baby vine tomatoes, all of which have come from my garden.
Delicately arranged on a platter to make me feel like a real king, my arteries possibly clogged a little as a result of this feast but was it all worth it? Absolutely, yes.
Here is my recipe for hollandaise sauce, follow my deadly instructions and you'll be sitting on a deadly sauce to finish your Sunday brunch big brekkies or benedicts, montreals, florentines, oh the list of lovelies goes on.
Hollandaise:
Ingredients
Sauce
500g Butter, unsalted
8 Egg Yolks
1tblsp Whole-grain mustard
Salt + Pepper
Vinegar Reduction:
150ml White Wine Vinegar
1 Shallot, finely chopped
Fresh sprig of Tarragon
2-3 Peppercorns
100ml White Wine, any open will do here
Add all the ingredients into a sauce-pan and turn on the heat baby! Reduce the liquid, allowing the aromatics to infuse. Reduce this right the way back until you have around 30 or 40 mls left, this is going to provide the acidic component of the sauce and give it the balance between the richness of the fat and eggs.
Add the 8 egg yolks and mustard into a food processor. Mean while heat the butter in a saucepan or microwave until boiling hot, the butter must be extremely hot for this sauce to emulsify correctly.
Strain off the aromats from the reduction and turn on the food processor. Add the reduction into the eggs whilst the machine is going. Allow to blend for a minute, the egg yolks will become a little frothy and probably double in size as it becomes aerated.
With the machine still blending, slowing trickle in the hot butter a little at a time, drop by drop. The hot butter will emulsify into the egg yolks. Providing the butter is hot and is added gradually, trickle by trickle, the sauce will not split or curdle.
Once all the butter has been added, stop the blender and check out the result. You should have a smooth butter sauce commonly known as hollandaise, well, at least my convenient spin on it! Season with salt and pepper (really crucial a good amount of salt is added, the difference is very much notable.)
The sauce can be kept for a couple of hours at room temperature, use a fork or whisk to move the sauce every once and a while to ensure it doesn't form a skin. The sauce cannot be refrigerated, and should be used fresh as it is made.
The recipe above will produced around 500-600ml of lovely sauce, half it if you are only cooking for 3-4. I would suggest that this recipe would suit 7-8 eggs benedicts, or whatever it is you are concocting.
If you curdle the sauce, you are unfortunately a bit of a novice and, if you are lucky and comment on my post, I may reply and let you know how you can recover and split hollandaise sauce, resurrect you might say!
Lovely lovely, happy cooking,
Mr. Slick.
No comments:
Post a Comment