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When my PolyScience Sous Vide Professional arrived on Friday, I had to decide what to cook in it first. It ended up being an easy decision. Eggs are such a primal food, and so delicious. Also, I had them on hand, which was useful since the immersion circulator arrived more than a week earlier than [...]

The English muffin may be the most overlooked building block in eggs Benedict. Although there are many options for the base that undergirds the bacon and eggs, the English muffin is, to my mind, the most traditional. Unfortunately, they’re generally considered to be simply a starchy filler and a sponge to soak up extra hollandaise [...]

The picture above shows a hollandaise sauce that’s about to break. Yes, I purposely broke a hollandaise sauce in order to write this post! And I did it with confidence, because I knew how easy it would be to fix. As you can see, the sauce is thick and starting to look shiny on the [...]

The key to mastering hollandaise sauce is understanding emulsification. As you whisk the sauce, you’re separating the butterfat into very, very small droplets (called the “dispersed phase”), and spreading them out through a certain amount of water (called the “continuous phase”) so they can’t recombine. It’s the same thing you do when making mayonnaise, or [...]

Eggs Benedict are a pretty flexible dish. You can switch out the English muffin for other baked goods, or potato pancakes, or even Portobello mushrooms. You can substitute smoked fish, or sausage patties, or vegetables like spinach (in the variation called eggs Florentine) for the back bacon. When it comes down to it, the foundation [...]

A couple of years ago, someone posted an interesting query to eGullet: Is there any kind of fare that Torontans (if that’s a word) call their own, like St Louis BBQ, San Francisco cioppino, or Brooklyn pizza? The answer on the thread was more or less unanimous: Toronto’s signature dish is, apparently, peameal bacon on [...]

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to do a series of posts on the dish that, to me, represents the pinnacle of brunch: Eggs Benedict. And with Canada Day taking place this week, what better component to start with than peameal bacon, a.k.a. back bacon or Canadian bacon. (Though there is some debate on [...]