Eggs cooked with an immersion circulator are not, strictly speaking, cooked sous vide, since they aren’t vacuum sealed. But they are an excellent candidate for the long-time/low-temperature approach that a circulator makes possible. Eggs consist of more than a dozen different proteins, many of which denature at different temperatures, which means you can produce several distinctly different results depending on the temperature you set the circulator to. You can see a good overview of the effects of different temperatures at Martin Lersch’s Khymos blog, and in the Cooking Issues primer.

When doing the poached eggs for my Eggs Benedict project, I used the traditional method of cracking the shells and dropping them into simmering water. While there’s always something to be said for classic technique, I think the immersion circulator approach is much, much more useful in some ways. For one thing, it means I can poach as many eggs as I want to at once, and have them all be ready at the same time. Using the traditional method, I’ve never been able to successfully poach more than 4 eggs at a time.

More than that, though, eggs cooked at a low temperature – in this case 64°C for 1 hour – have yolks that are perfectly cooked to the thickened-but-runny texture that I like. In contrast, traditional poached egg yolks have a gradient, from slightly overcooked at the edge, to (ideally, but not always) runny in the middle.

Not that there are no downsides. For one thing, it requires some advance planning, because they do take an hour to cook at this temperature, though once they’re in the bath you can forget about them until they’re done. As well, the white is not a traditional texture, and my husband wasn’t fond of the texture it did have, which is why my next run with poached eggs will be at 65 degrees.

Still, a 64-degree egg served on toast is a delight all on its own. After taking the photo above, I seasoned it with a little butter, salt and pepper, and enjoyed. I’m looking forward to making Eggs Benedict with this new tool.

English muffins are one member of a family of enriched, yeasted, griddle-baked breads popular in the United Kingdom; other members include crumpets and pikelets. Where crumpets are griddled on only one side, muffins are cooked on both, creating two browned surfaces and, ideally, a honeycombed interior. According to the Oxford Companion to Food, they peaked in popularity during the 19th century, when muffin men would sell them on the street for teatime. (It also calls English muffins “a physical base and a pretext for eating melted butter”!)

The recipe I used comes from Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, and is a process that, although it takes two days, is remarkably straightforward. It involves making a wet, batter-like dough, then resting it in the fridge overnight. The next day, a little baking soda is mixed in, and the dough is cooked on a griddle (or, in my case, a skillet) in cornmeal-dusted stainless steel rings to give the muffins their shape.

As is often the case, the trick is to cook them so they brown nicely on the outside but cook through completely. This involves filling the rings with the right amount of dough, and keeping the temperature low enough that the outside doesn’t burn. On my first attempt, I overfilled several of the rings, and the interiors were still slightly doughy.

Still, split – with a fork! – then toasted and dressed with butter and strawberry jam, these were delicious.

What’s your favourite way to eat English muffins?

But if you don’t get to it in time and it does break, you’re going to have to fix it. Just follow these simple steps:

How to fix a broken hollandaise

At this point, the sauce is well and truly broken. Transfer the broken sauce to another container, such as a measuring cup, and wash out the bowl or pot you’re making the sauce in.

Next, for every cup of butter in your sauce, add about a tablespoon of water to the bowl you’re using, and then add an equal amount of the broken sauce.

Whisk the two parts together until they’re well combined. As you can see in this photo, the sauce no longer looks “broken,” it just looks like a very thin hollandaise. Which is exactly what it is! From here, keep adding the broken sauce spoonful by spoonful, whisking to incorporate each addition. As you do, the sauce will start to thicken. If it thickens too much and looks like it’s going to break again, add a splash of water to smooth things out. (I had to do so with the sauce for this demo.)

Eventually, once all the broken sauce has been incorporated, you’ll be left with a hollandaise sauce that’s as good as new!

One of the great things about this technique is that it allows you to reheat leftover hollandaise sauce. If you find yourself with too much sauce, refrigerate it promptly. Then, when you want to reheat it, put it in a double boiler, and gently warm it. If there was enough water in it in the first place, it may not break, but if it does, you now know how to fix it.

Has a broken hollandaise sauce ever caused you to despair?

What makes hollandaise especially tricky is that butterfat is a solid (though a soft one) at room temperature, so you have to make sure it’s warm in order for it to be fluid enough to emulsify.

Because there’s heat involved, there are two big things that can go wrong: heat the sauce too much, and the egg proteins will coagulate, leaving you with very buttery scrambled eggs. If this happens, there’s not much you can do but start over with fresh eggs. (Though you can strain the cooked eggs out of the butter, and reuse the butter.)

Similarly, heat will cause the water in the sauce – whether in the form of vinegar, lemon juice or just plain ol’ water – to evaporate. If there’s not enough water, the droplets of butterfat will pool together, and you will end up with what’s known as a “broken” sauce. (The same thing happens if you add too much butter; it’s the ratio of butter to water that’s the important thing.)

To prevent this from happening, make sure you keep the heat steady but low (keep the sauce below 160°F to prevent the eggs from curdling). A double boiler is the easiest way to do this. And if the sauce gets shiny, and it looks like oil is starting to seep out, add a small splash of water to maintain the emulsion. If you don’t, your sauce will break.

The good news is that it’s easy to fix a broken sauce. More on this later.

Hollandaise has a reputation for being one of the trickier sauces to make. It took me a long time to conquer my fear of it, but it’s really not hard once you get the hang of it. One thing’s for sure: this is not a sauce you make from an envelope. If you’re going to indulge in the calorie bomb that is hollandaise, take the time to make it properly, because there’s really no comparison to the real thing!

I figured out hollandaise sauce while testing recipes for Michael Ruhlman’s book Ratio , and his recipe is the one I still turn to whenever I’m making it. Some people argue that his use of reduced vinegar is not traditional, but it tastes good, so who cares? Ruhlman does tend to prefer his hollandaise thicker than I do, though: he aims for a mayo-like consistency; I prefer mine on the thick side of nappé. (Admittedly, the sauce pictured above is a little thin for me. This can happen if you don’t cook the eggs yolks enough before adding the butter.)

Although eggs Benedict without hollandaise are not eggs Benedict at all, hollandaise is really just a template, a mother sauce. So you can tweak it with other ingredients to match the other variations you’ve made in the dish. If the meat layer of your Benedict is lamb, you can add come chopped fresh mint to the sauce (this is known as sauce Paloise). For eggs Florentine, a little nutmeg in the sauce would complement the spinach nicely, or perhaps a little dill. Or, just for fun, you could use chilis, lime juice and cilantro for a Mexican variation, or red bell pepper puree and anchovies for a Spanish flavour.

Do you make hollandaise sauce at home, or do you find it scary?

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 a bun. So it seemed like a logical choice for me to serve at my Canada Day party this year.

A word on terminology: Here in Canada, Canadian bacon is rarely called “Canadian bacon,” except when explaining it to foreigners. Locally, we call it either back bacon or peameal bacon. Moreover, what is often called Canadian bacon in the US is more akin to ham than to what you’ll actually find in our grocery stores.

There are three things that make for proper peameal bacon: first, it’s made from the loin, hence the “back bacon” designation. Second, it’s cured in a sweet brine, never dry-cured. Third, it’s rolled in, originally, pea meal (as in crushed dried peas), though cornmeal is much more common nowadays. In my experience, peameal bacon is usually unsmoked, but I’ve come across at least one Canadian reference (in Kate Aitken’s Canadian Cook Book) to it being smoked, so presumably this is a matter of preference. I might even give it a try next time.

After 48 hours in the brine, I removed my pork loin, rinsed it and patted it dry. A quick roll in a bed of cornmeal, and it was ready to slice! This has to be one of the easiest charcuterie items I’ve ever made: it uses a common cut of meat, doesn’t take very long, and requires no special techniques or equipment. The only catch is that you need curing salt, which contains 6.25% sodium nitrite. I order mine from Stuffers, where it’s sold under the name Prague Powder No. 1 for $6 a pound, which is easily enough to cure more than 40 pounds of loin.

Normally, I cook peameal by frying it in slices, though Kate Aitken also recommends roasting it whole or stuffing and baking. In this case, since barbecues are traditional for July 1, I grilled the slices, and nestled them into buns for our hungry guests, serving mustard and chili sauce on the side. I’m still not convinced that “peameal bacon on a bun” is Toronto’s one and only signature dish, but it was definitely well received for our Canada Day lunch!

What’s your favourite way to eat Canadian peameal bacon?