Making Eggs Benedict with Kenny Goliff

What is your favorite kind of egg?

I love cooking (and, of course, eating) eggs. They can be cooked and even baked in so many different ways and they can be integrated into so many amazing recipes. These recipes could include anything from basic scrambled eggs and hashbrowns to being baked with pasta to being cooked with tomato sauce and a tortilla (possible foreshadowing?). My personal favorite of all of these is the wonderful eggs benedict. Eggs benedict is a poached egg on top of a slice of ham (I prefer to use slices of tofu turkey) and an English muffin with delicious Hollandaise sauce poured over the top.

Back when I got my recipe book, I looked through the different recipes and saw eggs benedict as one of them. Immediately I wanted to try it to see if it was as good as what I usually made. I was so excited to try this new recipe, I read it over and over again until I had it memorized.

I didn’t make it for seven months.

However, when I finally decided to make it for the blog, I regretted not doing it sooner. The new recipe was so much easier, making it a much faster and simpler process, and it tasted a lot better than the usual. The new simplicity of the recipe was due to two specific and dramatic changes to the way the eggs are made.

Surprisingly, the first step was to add two tablespoons of vinegar to the water the eggs are poached in. According to the creator of the recipe, Diane Unger, adding vinegar to the water slightly changes the pH of the water- just enough to keep the eggs from falling apart into a big mess of egg (Unger 7). This simple step makes poaching eggs so much easier and, as opposed to most other faster techniques that don’t work as well, more effective.

The second step to making better eggs was actually very simple. All I needed to do was cook the eggs at the same time. This may seem like a pretty obvious thing to do, but it can make all the difference if the eggs are cooked at exactly the same time. If they are cooked overlapped or one after another, the temperature won’t be constant and the success of the eggs could vary. Instead of doing this, Unger suggests to “crack the eggs into four shallow teacups… [and] slip in the eggs” (Unger 7). By cracking all of the eggs into teacups instead of directly into boiling water, the eggs will all be ready at once to be poached.

The eggs were good.