I tried my first official recipe from the MCaH book (the first of many!). It wasn't a success, but I have 2 dozen more eggs and a pound and a half of butter in my refrigerator to play with.
I put the eggs in the sv in their shells, with the sv preheated to 149, the temp recommended in the MCaH for the hollandaise sauce. If I do this again at that temperature, I'll take the eggs out sooner. At 149 for 45 minutes, the yolks were beyond custardy and into the fudgy texture. Also, I didn't take the advice of boiling them quickly for 60 seconds prior to sving to set the white, and I really regret that, because even at this time and temp, the white did not solidify. Lesson learned and note made.
For the hollandaise, I made the white wine and shallot reduction, strained it, and blended it with egg yolks. This is when I learned you can't use an immersion blender in a bowl with a small amount of liquid. (I halved the recipe, since I cook only for myself and I can't save hollandaise sauce leftovers. Nor should I attempt eating it all to avoid waste.
I put the eggs in a cup, and blended it, then put it in a ziplock bag. I used the water bath method of removing the air from the bag, and left the sauce base in the sv for 30 minutes.
Post water bath:
I was expecting a less gel-like sauce base, this came out pretty, well, gelatiny! I debated squeezing it out of the bag, but finally ended up cutting the bag open and using a rubber spatula to scrape it out. This is when I remembered my immersion blender came with a handy cup, perfectly sized for blending smaller amounts of stuff.
Then I added the melted butter, and blended to emulsify. I am guessing this is where I went wrong, because it blended, but didn't emulsify into a rich, thick blend:
But I already had plated the toasted english muffin, with seared Canadian bacon, and sliced avocado, with the sv poached egg on top, and so I went for it anyhow.
It's almost as if the broken sauce is mocking me. I normally use Julia Child's method of hollandaise, and had great success the first few times, but the last two times I made it, it broke. I thought the sv would be fool-proof because of the base, but now I am thinking my melted butter is not hot enough, and so it's not properly emulsifing. (An online search suggested the base and butter must be the same temperature for a proper emulsion?) After all the fussing to get the base out of the bag and into a cup, it would have been quite cool. I am going to try this again, but I'll need to rewarm the base up to temperature, and ensure the melted butter is at the same temp. I could, theoretically, melt the butter, and stick the glass measuring cup directly in the sv to keep it at that temp, then do the same with the base cup after I get the base out of the bag. But then all of this seems like so much more work to get the same hollandaise that I can make on the stove top.
Thoughts?
