Modern Eggs Benedict, Part One: Spherical Hollandaise!

So there it is. A beautiful, spherical, hollandaise-flavored egg yolk, complete with still-attached chalaza(the membrane attaching the yolk to the shell, or the little white thing hanging off your raw egg yolks, to you and me). It is, in this context, the first step in completing a deconstruction of Eggs Benedict. In other contexts, it could be any number of things... a lovely, new-school garnish on a playful Filet Oscar or delicious rolled inside crêpes with diced ham, shredded cheese, and mixed vegetables; the possibilities here are endless.  And did anyone catch hotshot Fabio on Top Chef this season, making a spherical egg yolk for bigshot Wylie Dufresne? Yeah, he did... and Bravo withheld the recipe, too! Even bigshot Wylie asked Fabio how he did it.

Of course, the question on everyone's mind here is, 'How can I accomplish such a feat?'  Well, believe it or not, it's simpler to do than you might think.  A simple few, relatively readily-available, ingredients,  a few minutes in the kitchen, and you're ready to go.  A full recipe-style recipe is listed at the end of this entry... the rest is a super-simple walk through pictorial.

The Water Bath.

This couldn't be simpler. You take some water and add some stuff to it.  You"ll need some water, about 500 ml. 

Where I live, the water is pretty hard, which adds calcium, which messes up the whole shebang. See my previous post for why. Ok, you don't want to look at that. Too busy. Well, suffice to say that the 2.5 g of sodium alginate(available here for a song) that you'll be adding to that water makes a gel in the presence of calcium, which hard water is loaded with. To combat this, I used distilled water.

Here we are adding the alginate to the water...

And here we're mixing it with hand blender...

And here's the finished product. 

Well, that's cloudy and bubbly, so we need to let it sit.  Many sources say to let it settle overnight or for 12 hours, but I find that a couple of hours is fine. Once it's nice and clear, two and a half hours in this case, it's good to go.

 The Eggs

What goes into a hollandaise? Egg yolks, clarified butter, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and salt. Simple. The clarified butter will be used elsewhere in our Eggs Benedict, so we'll knock that out. In doing so, we lose a lot of the dilution that the strong flavors of the lemon juice and cayenne pepper need to smooth out and and become a cohesive flavor with the egg yolks. So, we need to cut way back on them.  I went with three egg yolks, weighing in at 47 grams. 

I went with 4.6 grams of lemon juice, about ten percent of the egg yolk weight. We need to watch the pH of this mixture. If it's too acidic, the spheres won't gel, also in my previous post.  

For the cayenne, I just used a pinch.

And the salt, too. I used my favorite, Celtic Sea Salt. It's grey color belies a great flavor and mineral level. I use it in pretty much everything.

Ok, so that's everything. All together, that weighs about 52 grams. I went for about a 2.5% solution with calcium lactate, also available here, so we've got about 1.4 grams. 

And we'll whisk it in to the egg mixture. 

From here, we just need a few tools. We need(left to right) a dosing spoon, seen here in attractive white plastic, a retrieval sieve, our egg mixture, our alginate bath, and a clean water bath, again distilled(not shown). 

Just take a dose of egg mixture...

and lay it into the alginate bath.

Here's all the spheres in the bath.

Let sit for about ten minutes, then remove them to the clean water bath. 

Remove them from the clean water and Viola! Beautiful, spherical, hollandaise-flavored egg yolks. Hooray! 

Oh, and the outcome? Ephemeral. Beautiful. A dose of rich, eggy sweetness, followed by bright lemon flavor and finishing with a slight warmth of cayenne. In short, just like hollandaise. Use as desired from here. Makes a great brunch amuse-bouche with a garnish or two(say, domestic caviar and snipped chives, served in a Chinese spoon, perhaps?), or as part of our dish.

Follows is the recipe in a basic format. Up next: Formed, poached egg white, to serve as the collar for our egg yolk!

Setting Bath

500 g distilled water

2.5 g sodium alginate

Spherical Hollandaise

3 egg yolks, approx. 47 g total

4.6 g lemon juice

pinch cayenne pepper

pinch Celtic sea salt

1.4 grams calcium lactate

Clean, distilled water, as needed.

For the setting bath:

Combine all ingredients and blend with hand blender. Allow to rest until all bubbles have dissipated. Reserve.

For the hollandaise spheres:

Whisk to combine first four ingredients. Gently whisk in calcium lactate. Allow to rest in refrigerator until all bubble have dissipated. 

Using a half-tablespoon measuring spoon, slowly spoon egg mixture into water bath. Allow spheres to set in water bath for 5-10 minutes, until set. Using slotted spoon or small sieve, remove to container of clean, distilled water, to rinse. Remove again onto plate. Serve as is or reserve in a sealed container under refrigeration for another use. Enjoy!