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Hi everyone, I'm Claire Saffas. Welcome to my home kitchen. Today I'm showing you a recipe that is perfect for Mother's Day. It's that classically fancy brunch dish called eggs benedict. Today I'm going to show you how to poach eggs, how to make a classic Holland sauce. It's like a little bit of a process and there's a lot of technique, but none of it's that hard. And then you have this beautiful, elegant brunch dish. And I'm super excited to show you how to make it. Dessert person. Poaching eggs was one of the first things I ever made by myself when I was like learning how to cook. I think that I had been watching an episode of the
French chef and Julia Child did it and I was like, I can do that and I went and I poached eggs. Holland sauce is like a classic French sauce. It is a warm emulsion. So, it is kind of like the warm version of mayonnaise, but it's made with butter and not oil. So, it's like an emulsification of melted butter and egg yolks, and it gets like super moussey and frothy, and it's so delicious. It's just a little finicky. So, we're going to kind of go over the techniques for how you make a successful holidays. And then we're going to poach the eggs, put it all together. I have some English muffins. You could do like a round of bio that's toasted. I have some asparagus for serving alongside
because holidays and asparagus is like such a delicious combination and we're getting into spring. So, it's a great Mother's Day dish. Ingredients, we have eggs. This is a very egg focused dish. I'm using Vital Farms large eggs. We're using yolks for the holidays and obviously whole poach eggs to put everything together. For serving, I have some English muffins, not homemade. If you want to see how to make homemade English muffins, you can check out this previous episode. I have some butter and also for the holidays, some cayenne and some lemon, salt and pepper for seasoning. For the poached
eggs, I have some vinegar. Really, it's best to use like distilled white vinegar, but I think we ran out and I don't we don't have any, so I'm going to use rice. It's fine. I need like light colored vinegar. Some chives are on top, asparagus, some smoked salmon, and some Iberian ham. The really classic ham selection for eggs benedict is like a Canadian bacon. You can use any ham. And I'm using smoked salmon, which I just learned makes it something called eggs royale. Equipment. So for poaching the eggs and for making the holidays, we're going to use small saucepans. I have two. And then one trick that I have for making poached eggs is to strain the egg. So I have a strainer behind me.
That's really it. Nothing too nothing too fancy. Before I get into the recipe, I want to thank our friends at Vital Farms for sponsoring the episode. I keep chickens at home, but they don't always produce enough eggs for what we go through because we're eating them for breakfast. I'm baking with them, using them in recipe testing. So, when I buy eggs from the store, I get Vital Farms. I know they're high quality because like the eggs from my chickens, the shells are hard, the yolks are vibrant. I know that they came from Healthy Hens, and that's super important to me. One really cool feature is they have this little newsletter in every carton called Vital Times. They have a bird of the month.
Gemma is a bird of the month on this one. I love them because I know how important it is for chickens to run around and touch grass and be able to peck and move freely. And Vital Farms works with over 600 farms, all of which are committed to pasture-raising their hens. And I know they're high quality because like my eggs for my chickens at home. The shells are hard, the yolks are super orange, and they perform beautifully in all of my baked goods. They have a really, really cool traceability feature where the name of the farm is printed on the side of the box. You can go scan the QR code. Type in the name of your farm and see a video feed of all the beautiful hens. It's so
cool. So, we got Dogwood Hollow. Oh my gosh, the hens. This really makes me happy cuz I know having chickens. I know they're meant to run around like they're animals. They need space. And these hens, they look very happy just pecking around. It's funny when you have chickens, you're like, you can tell if they're happy or not. Vital Farms, in addition to eggs, also makes butter. It's a high butterf grass-fed butter and I'm using it today in my eggs benedict. Special thanks to Vital Farms for sponsoring today's episode and you can go to their blog in the link below for more eggs and butter recipe info.
When you're making eggs than if you're making it at home, the easier thing to make ahead are the poached eggs, not as much as the holidays because the holidays in order for it to hold needs to be like kept at like kept warm at a very kind of specific temperature range. And so, but poached eggs can be made well in advance, a day in advance if you want, and you hold them in water and reheat them. So, I'm going to start with the poached eggs. So, here I have some water in a saucepan. And poaching is a method of cooking eggs where it's cooked gently in water, just under a simmer. You get ideally a set tender white and a kind of runny yolk. I don't love a yolk that's like per like super liquid. I
want it to be a little bit cooked so that it's more medium set rather than like fully runny. So, what helps in poaching eggs is to add a little bit of vinegar to your water. I'm going to add about a tablespoon. And it's best to use distilled white vinegar, but I don't have any, so I'm just using rice vinegar. The vinegar helps to set the white. So, I think the number one mistake that people make when they're poaching an egg is that the white just like totally spreads out. It is actually best to use a fresh egg for poaching because the fresher the egg, the more the white, the fresher the egg, the more the white holds together and that's what you want for poaching. So, I'm using Vital Farms large eggs. My
trick for poaching eggs is to strain the egg. So, even like a really fresh egg, you get little spindly white bits part of the white that like is just forms this kind of like spiderweb around the poached egg. But if you strain it, you c can kind of like remove that like watery part of the white so that you just have the part of the white that holds together. So I have a little water here for like removing the egg and as like a landing area. I learned in culinary school when we poached eggs that you actually need a pretty decent depth of water. You need an amount of water so that the egg can bob to the surface and not be touching the bottom.
You don't really want it like sitting on the bottom of the pot. You want enough bubbles so that the bubbles actually help to push the egg toward the surface. So it's not like you want zero bubbling. We're going to take an egg. So this is a really big egg. We're going to crack it into the strainer. So see that the like liquidy parts of the white are falling through the strainer, but the part of the white that's like holding together staying with the rest of the egg. So to poach, here's what we do. We're going to make a vortex. Meaning we're going to swirl the water around so that the center all the water is kind of moving around a center point that's still. So I'm using a whisk. The vortex
method means cooking one at a time. If you want to cook more than one at a time, the water is just still. The vortex helps to keep the egg all together in one so it doesn't just like spread out. So then the egg gets dropped right into the center. Then I have my little, you can use like a slotted spoon. I have like a little tiny skimmer here. Once the white starts to set and you know because it immediately starts to turn opaque is you can kind of help to like push the egg white so it's covering the yolk. But like I don't even think I really need to do that here cuz it's holding together nicely. What you can also do is if you get little bits of the egg white that come off, you can like skim them from the surface
and then ideally it sort of bobs to the surface and you can help to lift it off the bottom of the pan. I just want it cooked to the point where it's like it might run a little bit but it's thick. It's not just like total liquid uncooked yolk. And usually that's at like the 2 to 3 minute mark depending on your eggs depending on if they're cold are they room temp. I think if they're cold, they hold together a little bit better. When I lift it up, you can see the yolk right there. I'm touching it. I feel like I could use a little bit more time. All right, almost done. So, these are going to go into a bowl of just cool water. So, if you flip it over. So, that's our poached egg. You could poach these in
advance and they can stay in the water. I would say up to a day is fine. So, I'm just going to repeat that poaching process with three more eggs and I'll have four for serving. After your eggs have come out and they've cooled a little bit in the water, if they have lots of the little spindly like spiderwebby parts, you can literally just use take a pair of scissors and trim them and make them kind of nice and round. Then they're kind of like photo ready. If I were making these ahead of time by more than an hour, I would chill them like cold water, even ice water into the fridge and they'll sit there. But we're going to serve these pretty soon. So, I'm just going to leave them
at room temp. So, I'm going to turn this off. These look great. I'm going to just put these off to the side. And now we're going to go right into making the Hollands. So for the Hollands, I'm gonna actually use this same saucepan. So I'm just going to wipe this one out. And I'm also going to grab a second saucepan and my butter. Think of Hollands as it is a hot emulsion. Think of it as like the hot butter version of mayo, which is a cold emulsion. It's like yolks and oil. This is yolks and melted butter and it's warm. So for I'm going to start my proportion is it's about a yolk per four tablespoons of butter. So I'm going to do three yolks and 12 tablespoons. So classically the butter is clarified and
that means that it is separated from the water content and the milk solids and it's just the pure butter fat. Basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to gently melt this butter. I'm gonna put it on the stove behind me on low and it's going to really slowly melt. And what happens when you slowly melt butter like that without agitation is it naturally separates. You get like the water and milk solids at the bottom. You ever seen melted butter where it's like you have like little milky like a little milky watery pool at the bottom? That's the water and the milk solids. So, I'm going to just kind of gently let this melt behind me while I get my yolks clarified, meaning like separated from the whites. And I'm
going to do the first step which is called making your sabayon. So this is going to go here. I'm going to put on low. Okay. So let me grab the melted butter which I did not stir at all. So if you take a look at it, it has separated where like the clear or translucent yellow butter is on the top and the water's on the bottom. So we're just going to like decant it. Pour it off basically. So I'm just going to pour off the yellow butter fat. And it's okay if some of like the milk solids piggy back. I'm not really worried about that. So, you can see in the saucepan all that white stuff. So, there's still a little bit of butter on top. So, now here I have everything else that I am going to put into the Hollands. So,
traditionally, it's seasoned with like a little pinch of cayenne and lemon. I'm going to add it at the end, but I am going to get a little bit of the juice ready to go. So, Hollands is one of the mother sauces, sort of like one of the foundational sauces in French cuisine. And there's like all sorts of variations. So it's like if you start with an infusion with like vinegar and shallots and teragon and you make then you make bernay. So which is delicious. I love bernet sauce. Okay. But holl is kind of like a very allpurpose butter sauce. So we make it over heat. So I am going to get my saucepan over low heat initially.
Basically, you are whipping the yolks with a little bit of water and making this like very frothy, mousy mixture and cooking it. Like, you're basically cooking the yolks as you're constantly agitating them. So, it really stabilizes them. I'm going to start with my water. And I have 3 tablespoons of water here. I'm only going to start with one tablespoon, but I have extra water here in case I actually need to thin the texture of the eggs a little bit. So, starting with a tablespoon of water and my three yolks. Now, I'm working on an induction cooktop where I have extreme temperature control. If I were on a gas stove on a burner, I will be in a double boiler.
Basically, it goes opaque. It lightens in color and goes opaque and of course really, really thick. They're already cooked, guys. That did not take long. So, this is what that sav looks like when it's done. So, I'm going to get this back over low heat. Now, we are going to whisk in our butter. And like making mayonnaise, this is like a slow trickle. So, by going slowly, you are ensuring that you're making this emulsion between the fat and the yolks. And if you go too fast, you risk overwhelming the yolks, and then you're going to have a broken holiday sauce. Another really important consideration with holidays is that it's not getting too hot. Cuz if it gets too hot, it will also cause the mixture to break if the
butter gets too hot and the eggs. So, it's similar to making mayonnaise and that like you can constantly adjust the texture by adding a little bit of water if you need to. So, I've added all the butter. We have our holidays. I think it's a little bit thick, but I'm not going to use water. I'm going to now add lemon juice because I'm going to season it. So, maybe about I like it pretty lemony, so maybe about a tablespoon. I'm going to season it with some salt, some pepper, and a dash of cayenne. Oh my gosh, delicious. So good. So, I'm going to get this. You see that consistency? Beautiful. It's like moussey and thick, but still fluid.
Beautiful, beautiful color. And because there is the possibility of a skin forming, I'm going to cover it with plastic directly on the surface. Now, I'm going to get some warm water in here. Okay. I'm going to keep my heat on warm. This is going to go inside and this is going to hang out here while I assemble everything else for the eggs benedict. So, I just used the fork tines to like fork into them all the way around and then pulled them apart and dry toasted them in the toaster oven. If you don't want an English muffin, I think a really nice touch is like rounds of white bread that are toasted. So, I'm
going to assemble. Let's do some asparagus on the plate. And I'll do one ham. I don't have Canadian bacon. This is like a This is a Niberian ham. And then one smoked salmon. So, I'm going to grab my Hollise. I'm going to use the same warm water to warm up my eggs. Basically room temp now. But I want to just heat them up a little bit. And I'm just going to do two for now. And then whenever you're dealing with poached eggs that you're holding, you want to dry them off really well cuz they get kind of they just get watery. And I also just have some chives that I sliced for finishing. All right. So, let's let's look at the Hollands. I'm going to do one more taste and like a and just check for the texture. It's set up a little bit, but
it looks really good. It's so mousy. That's the texture that I want. Like, it's cuz it's so rich. It's made of egg yolks and butter, but I just want it to have that like super light consistency. And I think it needs like a drop of water. Okay, let's take the eggs out and dry them off. So, eggs go on top. Then, a nice coating of hollidays. Maybe little extra pepper. Little sprinkle salt. And that's it. That is our eggs benedict. Let's give it a taste. Want to just make sure that this stays warm. That looks really nice.
I mean, even for me, it could be a little more done, frankly. But I might be in the minority of people. Yeah. Like if you're ordering poached eggs, you might be someone that by definition wants it kind of runny. Somehow like eggs, English muffin, ham, butter. When you combine it in this way, it feels so fancy. So, I really hope you give it a try. Great brunch for Mother's Day or any special occasion truly. And also holidays, like cool technique, one of the mother sauces. A great thing to try out if you're like interested in technique and like a little bit of a kitchen project. So, I want to thank Vital Farms for sponsoring this episode.
It's a very egg focused recipe. And when my chickens aren't producing enough eggs, Vital Farms is the one I always pick out at the grocery store be partly because I love the traceability. So if you go to the link below, you can learn more about their entire traceability initiative. I hope you check it out. Thank you so much for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe.
