It has been scientifically proven that 93 percent of the folks (with a +/-4 margin of error) who line up for brunch each weekend are there for the Hollandaise sauce. (The rest? Bloody Marys.) One dollop of the golden sauce covers all varieties of culinary crimes, and somehow manages to make even English muffins a valuable part of your meal, even if only as a Hollandaise delivery device.
To get some help with making this major breakfast key, we turned to Chef John Currence, the James Beard Award-winning, Mississippi-based boss of two Big Bad Breakfast restaurants, as well as Oxford’s famed City Grocery. Currence’s new cookbook Big Bad Breakfast: The Most Important Book of the Day is filled with his often hilarious writing—his Country Ham Egg Muffin recipe begins “Dear McDonald’s: You make shit for food.”—as well as guides for making basically anything you could want when you rise, from biscuits to scrambled eggs to cocktails, as served in his popular Big Bad Breakfast joints.
“We talk about breakfast in terms of being the most important meal of the day,” Currence says, “but nobody was giving it it’s due. So I thought, what if we took breakfast and applied the same principles we do to lunch and dinner—from scratch, local.”
Being a native Southerner myself, it was a pleasure to welcome Chef Currence into my little New York City home to make his take on Eggs Sardou, a Creole riff on Eggs Benedict. Currence is a Louisiana native who has lived and worked all over the South, and is a lively conversationalist, able to go in one breath from Truman Capote to euthanizing a dog to the physics of fat molecules to Ole Miss quarterback Chad Kelly to a family of possums invading his guest bathroom. Chef Currence also had no issue with sweating through his dress shirt while cooking in my kitchen, which I admired.
To be clear, making Eggs Sardou is a fairly comprehensive test of your kitchen skills, and a project perhaps best suited for those with some experience. Taken slowly and tackled in pieces, there’s nothing impossible here, but it does require patience, precision, and some finesse. Then again, once you trot out a scratch-made Hollandaise for your friends or significant others, they’ll look at you in a gleaming new light. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
Eggs Sardou
(from Chef John Currence’s Big Bad Breakfast, ©2016 Ten Speed Press)
serves 2
For Serving
1 TB unsalted butter, room temperature
2 English muffins, split
4 large canned artichoke bottoms (or hearts), rinsed well
4 eggs for poaching
Creamed Spinach
3 TB unsalted butter
6 cups firmly packed spinach
2 TB all-purpose flour
1½ cups whole milk
½ cup grated parmesan cheese
Few dashes of Tabasco
Hollandaise Sauce
(makes 1 ¼ cups)
4 egg yolks
2 TB water
1 ½ tsp lemon juice
Pinch of salt and pepper
Four dashes of Tabasco
Pinch of cayenne pepper
1 cup of clarified butter
1. Let’s tackle this in steps, almost literally building this from the bottom up, beginning with the English muffins and artichokes. Fire up your broiler and get it hot, then split the muffins, butter them, and lay ‘em out on a sheet pan. On the same sheet pan, lay out the artichokes, drizzle them with olive oil and then dust with salt and pepper. Slide this whole thing under the broiler until the muffins are toasted and the artichokes get some color. If you want, go ahead and set out your plates and divide the muffins and artichokes among them.
2. Next up, creamed spinach! Throw all the spinach in a big sautée pan with a pat of butter, salt and pepper over medium-high heat, and stir until it all wilts down into a mossy-colored mound about the size of a softball. Dump this into a colander and squeeze until it dries out. Use a paper towel and wipe out the skillet, then over medium heat melt 2 tablespoons of butter. As soon as the butter has melted, whisk in 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour. (Don’t look know, but you’re making a roux!) Whisk, whisk, whisk, for about three minutes, until it just barely starts to turn golden. “You’re basically cooking the gluten so it doesn’t taste raw,” says Currence. Slowly add the milk and continue whisking to make sure there are no lumps. The sauce will thicken now, almost like a gravy, as it bubbles away for about five minutes. Whisk back in the dried spinach, the parmesan (“It’s a creamy enhancer”), a few shakes of Tabasco, and then a pinch of salt and pepper. Done! Drop a nice big spoonful onto each English muffin.
3. You may want to preface making the Hollandaise by clarifying the butter called for in the recipe. Chef Currence uses clarified butter for everything, so we melted a stick of butter, let it sit there simmering slowly for about twenty minutes, and then clarified the butter—we skimmed off the milk solids on the surface. If you’re in a hurry or looking to simplify, Chef Currence says you can also just use melted butter. ”Doesn’t make any real discernable difference,” he notes, “other than the texture can be a little different with the milk solids floating around in the finished sauce.”
4. Let’s Hollandaise! First, get a saucepan about half-filled with water and bring it to a simmer. Into a metal mixing bowl, the egg yolks, water, lemon juice, salt, pepper, cayenne and Tabasco. Rest the bowl on the pan so the steam is rising under it, and whisk the egg mixture constantly. You are cooking the egg yolks, as slowly as possible, and if you put them directly on the heat, you will most likely scramble them. If they scramble, is there any way to save your Hollandaise? “You’re screwed,” says Chef Currence. “You may as well start over.” After about 7 minutes, they will lighten in color and have the consistency of heavy cream. You can remove them from the heat.
5. The next minute is the key to the whole thing: With one hand slowly drizzle in the butter, while the other hands whisks like crazy. (If you’re working alone, set the bowl on a towel to steady it. Or get someone else to drizzle so you can whisk and the bowl doesn’t go careening off the counter.) You’ll see the butter sort of magically disappear into the sauce. “What you’re doing,” Currence explains, “is essentially you’re stretching the proteins as far as you possibly can, by cooking the egg yolk over hot water. When you drizzle the butter in, the molecules of butter are caught between those proteins and are cradled by those proteins.” Set aside your Hollandaise.
6. Last step! To that gently simmering water, pour in about three tablespoons of white vinegar. Once it’s back to a simmer, carefully crack an egg into the water. Using a spoon you can gently kinda fold it in on itself to make sure it stays together. The vinegar helps the egg stay together, but if you’ve got it boiling too high everything will fall apart. After about four minutes, remove the egg with a slotted spoon.
7. Put an egg atop each pile of spinach, then blanket the whole thing with a lovely dollop of Hollandaise. We then sprinkled each dish “with something red”—I grabbed smoked paprika, but cayenne would work, too.
8. EAT!
