The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Eggs Benedict

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Eggs Benedict should really be called Eggs Benedict Arnold, because it will betray any shortcomings you have as a home cook. You should give it a go anyway. (Kenji: “You CAN and SHOULD make Eggs Benedict at home.”) Why? It’s a dish that all but the best restaurants get right, and you have all but three and a half minutes to shovel it in your mouth before the window closes for the perfect bite. So you may as well perfect it at home.What does perfect look like? Each element is prepared to its ideal temperature at the exact same time. Yolks “a river of liquid gold” while whites are perfectly set (and shaped like a “chaos mop” if you’re like Deb). English muffins are fork split, not sliced. Hollandaise sauce is an emulsion, which means you are trying to mix two ingredients that don’t want to be mixed, so yeah, you are literally fighting nature. Who will break first, you or the sauce? A delicious showdown for the ages.Recipes Mentioned: Foolproof Eggs Benedict (Serious Eats) Easy Poached Eggs (Serious Eats) How to Make Eggs Benedict the Classic Way (Kenji’s Cooking Show) How to Make Eggs Benedict for a Crowd (Kenji’s Cooking Show) How to Poach an Egg, Smitten Kitchen-Style (Smitten Kitchen) Spinach and Smashed Egg Toast (Smitten Kitchen Old-Fashioned, No-Knead English Muffins Recipe (Serious Eats) Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hey, podcast listeners. I'm Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious and host of the Dinner SOS podcast. Each week on the show, we bring the expertise of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen to your kitchen. And this season, we've got a little something for everyone. We're debating whether spring produce is actually worth all the hype. There are ramps, which I genuinely do love the flavor of ramps, but now it's like, I don't know, is it cool to love ramps anymore?

Solving your hosting anxieties. People aren't coming over to like judge me on the cabinets that I did not choose, you know? Like they're coming over and if they want to judge me, they can judge me on my lasagna. And that is gonna rule. And helping you become a better baker with our BA Bake Club episodes. Caramel, you really have to be fearless. You have to be fine with burning the sugar

because once you add those additional ingredients, it'll sort itself out. So join us every week on Dinner SOS. And if you have a culinary conundrum, let us help. Email us at podcasts at bonappetit.com. Happy cooking. Kenji, what's your go-to brunch order? Like you're going out for a fancy brunch.

What are you gonna order? My favorite brunchy dish of all time would be chilaquiles, aka soggy nachos, as I describe them to my kids. You're gonna offend somebody? I know. Oh, God. Eggs Benedict would certainly be up there. I just don't always feel like I can stomach the...

Like, Eggs Benedict really are just, like, a way to hide as much butter as possible in a single dish. possible in a single dish. From PRX's Radiotopia, this is the recipe with Kenji and Deb, where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab and The Walk and a columnist for The New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen. She's also the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We've been professional recipe developers

for nearly two decades, and we've got the same basic goal, to make recipes that work for you and to make you excited to get into the kitchen. But we've got really different approaches. And on this show, we'll cook and talk about each other's recipes, comparing those to see what we can learn from each other. This week on The Recipe, we're talking about...

Eggs Benedict. That's coming up on The Recipe. Stay with us. In preparation for this episode, I went to the diner down the street and ordered some Eggs Benedicts, which I've never done there before. But when you order an eggs benedict at a diner, it's always a gamble whether it's going to be good hollandaise, mediocre hollandaise or powdered hollandaise, which is the worst. This place uses what is clearly powdered hollandaise because I've even seen like the little bits of undissolved powder in it. Maybe we can talk about what hollandaise is first and then discuss why powdered hollandaise is so horrible.

Or why don't we talk about what eggs benedict is first? Yeah. Eggs benedict, it's a four-part dish. So there's an English muffin, there is Canadian bacon, which they just call bacon in Canada. It doesn't exist in Canada. There's an English muffin,

which they just call muffins in English. It really is like around the globe. We've got French sauce, English muffin, Canadian bacon. Yeah. There's a poached egg. Of those things, the trickiest parts are obviously the poached eggs and the hollandaise. I think those are the two bits that make it

a dish that you typically go out for, makes it a little bit scary to try and make at home. So I think today we should talk about why you can and should be making eggs Benedict at home, and we'll talk about some tips about how to make those parts simpler and easier and more foolproof, and better than anything you can get at most diners other than the very best diners. It's a multi-hurtle dish. Even if you weren't intimidated by making hollandaise sauce you might be intimidated by

poaching eggs and so there's definitely a lot to, there's a lot of technique involved in making it. And not only that, there's timing involved also because hollandaise and poached eggs, if you make them the sort of traditional way, they're pretty difficult to, you can't make them the day before, unless there's some secrets. It's difficult. So if your guests arrive late or you them the sort of traditional way, they're pretty difficult to, you can't make them the day before, unless there's some secrets.

It's difficult. So if your guests arrive late or you're the kind of people who like to enjoy a few mimosas before you're able to get everyone down at the table, it's really hard to get the timing on those poached eggs and hollandaise. Hollandaise in particular,

let's start with the hollandaise. Hollandaise in particular is a real notoriously tough sauce because it's got eggs and butter. It's an emulsion of eggs and butter, the same way that mayonnaise is an emulsion of eggs and oil. It's an emulsion of eggs and butter the same way that mayonnaise is an emulsion of eggs and oil. Butter mayonnaise. It's butter mayonnaise.

Exactly. Butter mayonnaise. The problem with hollandaise though is that even after you form that emulsion, which is difficult in itself, if it gets too cool, the butter fat starts to solidify and it ends up breaking the sauce. The fat comes out of it and when you try and reheat it, it doesn't work so well. If it gets too hot, the eggs curdle and you end up with really sauce. The fat comes out of it and when you try and reheat it, it doesn't work so well. If it gets too hot, the eggs curdle and you end up with

really buttery scrambled eggs instead. There's a narrow temperature range that you have to hold the hollandaise in even after you've completed making it. That's part of the difficulty. The other difficulty in it is making it to begin with. Deb, what's your go-to technique for making hollandaise? My go-to technique for making holl My go-to technique for making holidays is I usually use a blender. Although I should say I have a recipe for a very,

it's a variation on eggs Florentine in my first cookbook, the Spit in the Kitchen cookbook and I have a hollandaise in there and you make a blender. Eggs Benedict that you've dropped on the floor. Exactly. Actually, I was trying to get us over the hurdle of having to make poached eggs by having you make soft-boiled eggs and you smash them on toast with the... Honestly, I think soft-boiled eggs are a really good swap if you don't want to go through... We can talk about that when we get to the egg portion. But anyway, so I worked on a...

I started making holidays in the blender back then, and I really found it to be great. You know, you blend up the yolks and then you start drizzling in your lukewarm melted butter. You start with just a couple drops at a time, just the way you would if you were making a mayonnaise. You start with a very small amount and eventually you can move to a very thin stream. At the end, you might add some lemon juice and then salt and pepper to get the seasoning right. You definitely add lemon juice. You definitely add lemon juice. However, I was revisiting that recipe and I don't have the same blender that I had back then and I found that in the Vitamix

I use these days it wasn't It didn't have enough to grab on to even at the new yolk level Then I used my immersion blender because I was really working through it Then I use my and it also just didn't have The depth like the blade wasn't far enough down. And finally, I just whisked it by hand and it was perfect. And yeah, exactly. You really, it's much harder to mess it up.

My arm was tired. It's arm day. You're going to eat a lot of butter, so it all balances out. But yeah, so I would say that if you're nervous in a way, it's unless you're making a larger amount or are sure that the blade of whatever machine you're using goes down low enough, doing it by hand is the safest. Yeah, it's still whiskey business. Making by hand.

So making by hand is the traditional way, right? And if you want to do it like the way a French chef tells you to do it, you get a pot of barely simmering water and you place a bowl on top of it, and then you put your egg yolks and your lemon juice in that so that you want, because you want your eggs to cook slightly so that the sauce has a little more volume and is a little bit thicker. Although a lot of modern recipes for Holland days don't have you cooking those egg yolks first. And then you would slowly whisk in your butter.

But yeah, the blender methods, I find them really great. But yeah, the problem is that you do need a minimum volume. There's a couple tricks around that. So like at the beginning, rather than starting with just your egg yolks, if you start with egg yolks, lemon juice, and then just a little bit of water, you can get the volume high enough in there that you can then drizzle in the rest of your butter. You can also use whole eggs and that gets the volume higher. Because basically you need enough of the volume before you start drizzling the egg yolks that, before you start drizzling the butter, that the egg yolks aren start drizzling the butter that the egg yolks aren't just splashing against

the side of the blender wall and staying there. You need a little bit of a vortex in order to pull the butter down slowly. I don't know the chemistry of this because that's your job. I did find though when I added the lemon a little earlier on, I sometimes just it wasn't getting the right thickness. And I didn't really get it like what it was chemically doing to the yolks. It just was a thinner sauce, even using the same exact measurements.

I found that it was working better when I added it at the end. And I've made a lot of holidays before, and I never had struggled before, but it was one of those days in the kitchen where we must have made it like eight times. Like we tried every method and it just, it really was just more reliable when I added the lemon juice at the end.

The explanation that I could think of, I can't think of any direct chemical reason why that would be the case. I think it's probably more temperature related. Okay. In that when you add lemon juice to the egg yolks at the beginning, you're creating a larger volume of stuff and so then when you add your warmer hot butter to it, it just doesn't reach the same temperature.

The egg proteins don't reach the same temperature. And some of the thickening, so part of the thickening in the hollandaise comes from just the emulsion itself. So like an emulsion is when you have a fat suspended in water or the other way around, it could be the other way around, but things that don't typically mix, you force them to mix. And one of the rules of an emulsion is that a proper emulsion is going to be thicker than either of its two constituent parts. So part of the thickening comes from the emulsion itself, but part of the thickening in a proper hollandaise also comes from the egg proteins tightening a little bit. And so the only reason I could think that adding your lemon juice at the beginning and

having everything else be exactly the same would change the consistency of your hollandaise is that because you're adding the larger volume at the beginning, the egg proteins never come up to as high a temperature as they would if you were just adding the butter straight to them. The recipe I have in the food lab, it has you heat the butter to a specific temperature, so that when you then add it to the eggs in the lemon juice, you know that it's going to bring those up to the right temperature to

thicken it fully without scrambling it So that's a worker rock. It's more work because you need a thermometer But I just say lukewarm obviously not hot enough to cook an egg But yeah lukewarm or you can half melt it and whisk the rest of the butter in so it's got a nice mid-temperature Not cold not hot, but I understand it But I do agree that making the hollandaise by hand, it requires a lot of whisking, but it's not as hard as people say it is, as they'll have you believe.

The very first time I tried to make hollandaise, I had not seen anybody do it before. I had not seen any pictures, I had not seen any videos. I only have a very basic written description of how it was done. And I'd never tasted real hollandaise in my life either. So I didn't know what it was supposed to taste like, what it was supposed to look like. And I tried making it in a skillet.

I put the egg yolks in a skillet, added a little bit of lemon juice. I was like whisking them with a fork. And then I just added butter to the skillet and just like tried to mix it all up. And it was real bad. I got basically lemony melted butter with some bits of scrambled eggs in it and it didn't

taste good. But a proper hollandaise, when you spoon it over a poached egg, should drape the egg, it should envelop the egg. It should not break off and slide down the side so that you can see the egg white again. It should coat the egg so that the egg is completely pale, gold, and yellow. So the hollandaise you might use on like asparagus, because hollandaise is classically used as an asparagus dressing. Asparagus and eggs, yeah. And classic French cooking.

That one, I feel like you can have it a little bit thinner, more like a thick dressing texture. But I do agree that for the hollandaise that you put on your poached egg, I feel that you want to resist. I'm going to deeply disagree with you. Resist because you like it when it forms like a nice hat on the eggs and doesn't fall down immediately. I want my hollandaise thick enough on my asparagus that I can,

that it does the same thing that when you eat it, the hollandaise stays on top and it keeps some of its shape. Yeah, for me, a hollandaise should not quite the stiffness of a mayonnaise, but it shouldn't be like a spoonable sauce. It should be a sauce that you have to dollop. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. And that was the ones that really looked the best on it

and worked the best. Now we were making eggs Florentine, which is one of the many variations of eggs Benedict that exist, but it's actually my favorite and that's my go-to. Although I would say if a place is making good chilaquiles or really good like Cuevos Rancheros, I'm probably going to order that first.

But if they don't have that, if it's not something they specialize in, I'm probably going to order eggs florentine. And eggs florentine, instead of having a piece of Canadian bacon or ham, it has sauteed spinach underneath. And I find it to be the perfect breakfast meal because I get my greens, I get my buttery sauce, I get my perfectly cooked egg, and it's my favorite. You could put bacon on there and I would still eat it, but I like having my greens with breakfast. I'm going to try, so I did get these eggs Benedict from down the street. I'm going to demonstrate everything wrong with an egg that people can't see this at home, but

the first thing you see. I'm going to roast this place. I won't say what the name of the shop is. Of course not. But they're very nice people there. So the first thing you notice is that the Holland days has lumps in it. And then if you like take a little bit of the Holland days and stick it in your finger and put it in your mouth, it tastes starchy. Like it tastes like you can taste the powderiness to it. There's a little bit of bitterness to it. There's no fresh butter flavor because so it's clearly made with a, like a packet

of Holland days, which is thickened with starches as opposed to the proper emulsion. The eggs are when you cut them open, like the yolks barely move. And I want my egg yolks to be like a river of liquid gold. And I want that to mingle with the hollandaise and enrich it. I'm fine with that. But if the white has any liquid in it, I've lost it. I need the yellow to be loose and the white to be fully set. Yes, that's fair.

Very ick. Very ick. Yeah, that's fair. The ham is this kind of thin sliced deli ham that has no color on it. And it should be Canadian bacon that's been sauteed so it's a little bit browner. Ideally in a diner it's done on a flat top and you get a little bit of brownness. Yeah, it should be griddled. The English muffins are untoasted. Okay, so I was just going to blame the toasted English muffin for if you wait a while,

if it's like delivery food or pick up food, it's not going to have that perfect window of time where the egg is the correct temperature. If you're putting it on top of a toasted English muffin, the egg is going to cook a little bit longer than you want it to, so you'd want to serve it quickly. But since the English muffin was untoasted, I think we cannot blame that. You can't blame the delivery.

You can't blame the hot English muffin for the egg being overcooked. For overcooking the egg. No, it's still edible. This is not very good. I actually did not know that powdered hollandaise existed. I have seen like pre-made hollandaise. It's right next to the powdered gravy and the powdered white sauce. I think I'm just not there in that section of the grocery store as an ingredient cook

and as an ingredient household. I just didn't know that it existed. But it does explain it because when you think of the fussiness of it, hollandaise is a, it's one of the five French mother sauces, which I get a huge kick out of describing things as. But it's a really classic sauce and it has egg yolks and butter and it's not, if a diner's putting out 300 different iterations of breakfast each morning, it's wild that they would have time to also make this hollandaise that needs to be perfectly suspended at a temperature. Some places do.

And one of the tricks, I was a brunch cook for a while, like a breakfast and brunch cook. And the trick is finding the exact right spot on the flat top, because they have different temperature ranges. And as a cook, you get to know what's the hottest part, what's the coolest part, where should I be storing this sauce, where should I be storing that sauce? Like where does the clarified butter go? And if you find like the right, exact right spot on the flat top,

you get a bain-marie, so like a water bath. You have to find like the right height to elevate it to, to keep your hollandaise right. There's a way that you can, if you've dialed it in, that you can consistently make your hollandaise and then keep it sitting there throughout service and it'll stay at that exact 145, 140 degree temperature range. This is not something every diner is doing. No, no, especially not if they're using powdered hollandaise. They are not.

It's not necessary. It's not necessary. But at home, I would make, I make the hollandaise last or almost last so there just isn't you don't have to worry about it you don't have to worry about spending it because I'm just trying to make it I'm trying to lower the hurdles as much as possible so if we make it near the end of our cooking prep or we just keep it in one bowl set in another bowl of lukewarm water it's gonna be fine for whatever 30 or 45 minutes you need to even if you were preparing everything else afterwards. Yeah I tend to make my hollandaise

in a relatively heavy pot. Like I'll transfer to a relatively heavy pot and then stick that pot near the back of my stove when I'm doing everything else so it stays at least a little bit warm. And then if it starts to, it'll thicken up whether it cools down or overheats. And as long as you're in the general right temperature,

it's not gonna be irretrievably broken. If you go and look at it and it's thickened up a little bit, what you can do is just whisk in a little bit of hot water to get it to the right consistency. And that hot water thing works whether it's too cold or too hot, just like getting it to the right consistency with a little bit of hot water and a whisk is what I do right before serving it.

Or some lemon juice if it needs a little more brightness. Yeah, you always want to taste it. And that's another one of the problems that you find with. So a great Hollandaise sauce is one that is made mostly of butter. You know, Hollandaise is mostly butter and eggs, really rich stuff. But because of the technique, it should be frothy and have volume to it and enough lemon juice and salt that it tastes really bright and light. Like a Hollandaise sauce is really rich, but it should taste light on your

palate. It's all that butter is hidden. I've never felt like when I'm eating it, when it's a good one, that it tastes that heavy. I feel like it has a reputation of being very heavy, but especially when you're putting it on a poached egg, which is an egg cooked without any fat, there's no frying, there's nothing added to it. So it's a very clean tasting egg. And as I said, I prefer the bed of spinach, which is usually pretty simple. And then you've got a toasted English muffin, which is probably dry. You don't need to butter it or anything. And so the sauce is like the whole richness of the dish, or at least that's the way I make it at home. But you also need to poach eggs, which is another additional hurdle. Now, poached eggs are probably my favorite way to cook an egg.

Oh, yeah. I make them for lunch all the time, so I have an unusual amount of practice making poached eggs. I used to be really bad at it, and once I figured out how to do it very early in my smitten kitchen years, that was it. So what is your trick? I'm not going to say it works 100 percent of the time, because if I say that,

I'll mess up the next five, but I would say 99.5 percent of the time it works. Nothing foolproof, just fool resistant. Exactly, fool resistant. I'll mess up the next five, but I would say 99.5 percent of the time it works. I get- Nothing is foolproof, just fool resistant. Exactly. Fool resistant. I do my best sometimes to be the fool. So I take a pot of water and I bring it to, I think we call it like teeming and cooking.

It's right below boiling. Right below boiling, you don't want to see bubbles. It could just be- So right below a simmer, like where you see little bubbles, but there's no bubbles popping up. Absolutely. I add some vinegar to the water.

I know some people don't. I can do it without the vinegar, but I always do a little bit of vinegar, which is supposed to make it a little tighter. I also don't really mind the flavor. So that was another part of it. For me, the vinegar gives it like a slightly chalky texture on the outside. Okay.

So to me, I'm just like sensitive to that. So I don't, but yeah, I know a lot of people who add the vinegar and it's, and it definitely makes it a little bit easier. I think it makes it a little bit easier although you really can do it either way there are times I've forgotten to do it and it's fine. Then I use usually the back of a spoon and I make a little whirlpool not too violent and then I usually I don't always but I do find it goes a little

better if I crack an egg into a dish first and then pour it in to the center of the whirlpool. Once the whirlpool slows down, it's already wrapped around itself and I keep it at this low temperature. Usually for, I want to say about five minutes is usually the right cooking time. Yeah, that'll get you something like a little bit verging on jammy, but still a little bit liquid inside. At your low temperature, you'd probably still be liquid inside. For me, it's not about the yolk.

That white better have no clear. I cannot, any clear in the white, I'm like, it's really, I can't handle it. So I don't mind if the yolk has gotten a little bit thicker, but again, I think three to five minutes is usually the recommendation, but I do find with three, it's quite loose. You really do risk some clear white,

but usually after about, now this depends on the pot I'm using. After about a minute, I sometimes take the spatula with a spoon just to kind of lift it off the bottom if it's sunned a bit. With a nonstick you might not notice it, but with other pots it can anchor a little bit. It can, yeah. And you get little bubbles underneath sometimes. Exactly. I don't want that flat-sided thing. I want that like- You get pockmarked. Exactly. I don't want it to look like it landed on something.

It's not entirely necessary, but that means that it'll move around freely, and you'll get that really great natural shape. And I do that after a minute because at that point, the whites are set enough that it shouldn't mess, shouldn't change the shape or scramble the whole egg to do it. And that's it. And then you drain it, and you can make, I can make a couple in a pot, but you can also make them and keep them. And they do this at restaurants. I'm sure you can talk to your restaurant experience where you make a bunch at a time and warm them up later.

Yeah, you can make eggs, you can poach eggs up to a few days in advance, exactly. You put them in an ice bath after they're cooked and then just store them in water in the fridge. And then usually what I do is I just take hot water from a kettle or if your hot water tap is hot enough and just pour it over the eggs and let them sit for a couple of minutes and just to refresh them and they warm up and

then you can serve them immediately. When you're batching them like that, do you take the egg off like maybe a minute before it's fully cooked just so it can continue cooking when you put the hot water on or you don't worry about it? No, because I don't pour the hot water doesn't get it hot enough that it's going to continue cooking. So, yeah, I know the hot water is basically just warming it up. So I take them to exactly where I want them, shock them in an ice bath, and then just store them in the fridge. It's a really great way because for me, trying to poach

eggs when there's, if you're trying to poach a dozen eggs and there's a dozen people like watching you, that's when you're going to mess it all up. So it's much more, it's much easier to poach your eggs in advance. And so then when you have your friends over for brunch, all you have to worry about is making the hollandaise. The method you outlined is the real sort of classic method for poaching eggs. Like that's how you're taught to poach eggs in restaurants. You make a whirlpool, salt in the water to season the eggs,

sometimes a little bit of vinegar if you want to. And then, yeah, exactly. You tip the eggs into the center. I do a couple of things a little bit different. So the first one is that I strain my eggs in a fine mesh strainer. And why do you do that? So it's because if you take an egg and you crack it open, say into a bowl or a plate and you look at it,

there's the yolk and there's the white, but the white is actually two different phases. There's what I refer to as the tight white, which is inside a clear membrane. That's the part that has that set shape. And then there's this loose white, which is the liquids that seeped out of that membrane, because it the part that has that set shape. And then there's this loose white, which is the liquids that sort of seeped out of that membrane because it's a permeable membrane, right?

So there's, as the egg ages, more and more of the white kind of seeps out of it. But there's always going to be some amount of loose white and tight white. And so if you strain your eggs in a fine mesh strainer and just swirl them around a little bit, you end up draining off those loose whites, which are what make the water really cloudy and what give the eggs like a kind of misshapen ghost-like appearance. And so all you're left with is the tidy whiteys. That way you get a much sort of cleaner, tighter egg shape when you put it into the water. So that's one of the things I do. But if you like the straggly ghost shape, I like them messy looking. I don't want like

clean, neat, perfect oval. I like the little straggly bits. Sure. I don't mind them, but I do find first of all that they cook faster than the rest of it and so they get a little bit, I'm not a big fan of the texture of them, but the other thing is that when you leave them in, what can sometimes happen is that if you're poaching say like a half dozen eggs, your water can get really cloudy because of that. And so it becomes more difficult to fish out the eggs at the end or to move them around while they're cooking.

And you just run a bigger risk of breaking them, I find. But yeah, the other thing I do is that as they're cooking, I maintain the really lazy whirlpool so that they never rest in one place on the bottom. And that way, I just find they get like a slightly better shape. It also gives me something interesting to do in the kitchen, but they get a slightly better shape that way. But really cooking them in advance, shocking them and reheating them, I think, is the biggest, most important tip

for making your brunch more casual and less stressful. Also, for such a fragile seeming egg, they're really pretty sturdy once they're cooked. Like you can pick them up, move them around, scoop them up with a spoon. Obviously, if you hit it hard enough, you might break the yolk in the center. But even I find I usually just drain them on paper towels and just pick them up and move them around. Oh, with your hands? Yeah, they're not as fragile as they seem. If you go to a restaurant, the poached eggs have

almost definitely been picked up by human hands and placed onto your so many reasons never eat out. by human hands and placed onto your. So many reasons you never eat out. Today on the recipe with Panty and Ted. The other neat thing, the other neat thing about poaching eggs is that because eggs have that membrane around the white that keeps them together, they're like little, very, very delicate water balloons. But what it means is that you can actually take all of your eggs and put them into a single bowl or a single strainer if you're doing it

and then just dump them into your water at once. You don't have to do them one at a time. Like I've done three dozen eggs at a time and a really large strainer, broke them all into the strainer, let them drain, let the loose whites drain out, which you can save for your meringue or omelet or whatever. And then you just tip it into a really big pot of boiling water and they all will separate nicely. And not with the Whirlpool.

Yeah. I started Whirlpool and then I maintain like a little bit of a whirlpool. But when you get rid of those loose whites, the eggs do a really good job of maintaining their own shape. It's the same way that when you release a droplet of water in space, the surface tension pulls it into the shape with the least amount of energy, so it pulls it into a sphere. So an egg that's suspended in a water bath, as long as it's not like just sitting flat on the bottom,

will tend to pull itself into the least energy shape, which is an egg shape. So you don't really need the whirlpool. What you really want to do is just make sure that they're not sticking to the bottom. Okay, I'll try it. I'll try to straighten it. I just, I like the straggly bits. I like the little chaos mops of eggs.

I like things a little bit messy. I don't want it to look perfect. How do you feel about the technique where people break them into a little piece of plastic wrap and then tie up the plastic wrap and then put it in the water? I'm opposed to all of these things. But again, I just really like,

they are my favorite cooked egg. I love poached eggs. So I don't want any of that. I want the rough edges and the bloopy ghost shape. And I understand it might make it easier for some people. But, well, the problem with the plastic wrap thing is, first of all, it looks like an egg that was wrapped in plastic wrap. Like you see the ridges from the plastic wrap around it.

But more importantly, they're not poached eggs at that point. Like, you might as well just leave the egg in the shell and soft boil it because you're doing the same thing as just soft boiling the eggs. You're cooking it through some sort of barrier so that the egg is not actually coming in contact with the water. Oh yeah, that looks gross. I'm looking at it now. It looks gross.

That's gross, right? Yeah. So that's why I feel like if you really don't want to poach an egg, we certainly spent enough time talking about it that it sounds like a huge hassle. I think that the soft boiled egg, the six minute, seven minute one that you peel, it's going to have firmer edges, but you're gonna get that same effect where you're gonna have the set white and the loose...

Six minute egg? Deb, you and I have very different feelings about how done our eggs should be. I really, I cannot, if that white is clear, if there's any clear there, I'm out. What about not clear, but like ghostly white and slightly snotty? God, no.

Stop it. Snotty. God, no. Stop it. Snotty is not helping the case. What is Canadian bacon? Is it bacon that lives in Canada, that has a secret girlfriend in Canada? Is it tariffed bacon? What is it? It's loin bacon. So it's pork loin. So the bacon in the U.S. is made from pork belly that's been smoked and cured, whereas Canadian bacon is pork loin. So it's equivalent of, say, Irish bacon, although when we say Canadian bacon in the U.S., typically we mean pork

loin that has been pressed into the sort of cylinder shape so that the slices of it are perfect circles. It's the closest thing you would find in Canada aside from actual loin bacon would be P-meal bacon, which is a cured pork loin that has been rolled in corn flour, cornmeal. And that's similar to Canadian bacon,

but really what we call Canadian bacon is just ham. It's just round ham, and it's largely an American product. I don't know why it's called Canadian bacon, but it's an American thing. You can't just use like sandwich ham. The diner down the street did? Yeah, it's not going to get crisp. There's something more dense and fatty about it where you can get it crisp. You can at least griddle it. Yeah, not necessarily fatty, but for sure, yes. It's meatier and it's denser. You can get like a thick cut ham steak, right, and use that.

But yeah, it doesn't work with just really thin, deli sliced ham. And often I find I would prefer some slices of streaky bacon anyway, real like regular American style bacon anyway, over the Canadian bacon. But we've already established you're a spinach lover. I don't mind bacon on the side or even on it. I just need the spinach.

I like spinach. I think spinach just beautifully absorbs the hollandaise, the egg yolks. It feels like a more balanced breakfast. Right. You can convince yourself that it's healthy. It makes me happy. I like the color green. What about the English muffin?

Do you have strong thoughts on English muffins? My only opinion on English muffins is that you cannot cut them open. It flattens the crags and that upsets me. You need to pull them apart with your fingers. Oh, I was going to say. If you're up to the fork split, I think I like work my way around and tear it because I want the teeth. Yeah.

So you use your hands. Yeah, no, I prefer to fork them. But they're usually they arrive, if you're like buying Thomas's, they arrive fork split so you can just pull them around with your fingers and then you can get nice. I want to try not to use an implement for because I want to get it I want it as craggy as possible inside. Exactly. Yeah.

You want those nooks and crannies you want those bits that are going to harden up and give you some texture in the toaster. Have you had like exceptional English muffins anywhere have you made English muffins at home I'm sure you've tried to make English muffins at home and have a recipe for them. I have made them several times. I do have a recipe for them in my second book. I've made them at home. I actually made them, it's just, it's a really just a wet almost, it's a loose almost focaccia like, you know, quick, yeah, quick batter. You usually use, I usually use some milk instead of water. So you don't yeast them?

I do, no, sorry, it's a yeast. But I'm like, like focaccia like where it's loose. You want, you're trying to get bigger bubbles in it. And in general, they work best. You can make them without rings, but in general for the biggest holes, they work best with rings or you could save old tuna cans and cut the top and bottom off and wash them and use that as your rig.

If people haven't made English muffins at home, the important part is that English muffins are baked on a griddle, not in an oven. So it's basically like a loose, they're almost like a yeasted pancake that are thicker than a pancake and are generally a lean dough. So it's very similar to focaccia dough, so not a lot of fat in the dough. It's kneadable but very loose and then you cook it on a flat top like you would a pancake. It's a really easy dough.

You could wake up and make it in the morning and shape them an hour later. As long as you have enough time to let the yeast rise. Yeah. I do them overnight. You can. Yeah, you can definitely do it overnight, but it's actually a very easy thing to make. I think the trickiest thing is that there are recipes,

and I've done recipes where you don't use the rings, they just don't usually have as big holes. It's tricky. If you want to have big holes, you need to have a little ring to it. But, so yes, I've made them from scratch. I've also had really good, there's this brand, I don't know if it's just around here. I wanted it, it's like damn good English muffins,

and they're like sourdough English muffins. They're really good. I'm looking for it on my phone. Have you ever been to the model bakery in Napa? Yes, those were unreal. I was there last year. They were so good. Their secret is that they fry them when they're baking them, they do it in quarter inch of

clarified butter. They get infused with really buttery flavor, but they're really nice and tall and not, I wouldn't say fluffy. These have lots of nooks and crannies inside, but they're really light in texture, but really buttery in flavor. So if you ever find yourself in Napa, the English muffins at Model Bakery. But- Legendary. I think the Sirius Seeds have their recipe.

Somebody has their recipe online and it's still solid. Stella Parks has a recipe online. Oh, Mary's salad. Yeah, I think they do. I think there's a little less butter than you're going to see if you watch a video of how they make them at the Model Bakery, but they are just unreal. When I went there, I also brought some home in a bag.

They really reheated well, maybe even better than most just because I think of all the butter in it. Oh yeah. Serious Eats does have Model Bakery's English Muffins. I thought they did. I've heard the recipe is like very solid. If you want to really go to 10 with your eggs Benedict this weekend. Yes.

But I feel like when you've gotten English Muffins that good, like it's almost, you almost just want to eat the English muffin on its own. Jam and butter. Fork it and eat it. Kenji, can you waffle eggs Benedict? No, but you can put a poached egg and hollandaise on a savory waffle. Very good one too. You can incorporate the chopped ham right into the batter.

Mmm, that'd be really good. Kentie, could you taco eggs Benedict? No, but you could put a poached egg and ham and hollandaise on a tortilla and use that as a delivery mechanism to bring it to your mouth. And I think that would probably, I don't know if it would be better than an English muffin, but it would be damn good. It would be very good. So does Egg Benedict make good leftovers?

I feel like we've established that this is just, this is not a, there are things you can do ahead, but if you can just make it right before, I think that's the way it's going to taste the best. Eggs Benedict aren't even good by the time you get to the last bite of them. It's something they have to- Stop. You got to really shovel them in fast if you want them to be at their peak. The half-life of eggs Benedict is maybe three minutes, I'd say.

All right. Can you cook it in a pan with butter? I feel like no. No. That would be terrible. No. You fundamentally change what the dish is. You'd ruin the holidays.

You'd ruin the egg. From good to bad. I do actually, since at this point, like if you're making it, like at this point you've got, you've poached, you've made hollandaise, I definitely at that point don't take out the toaster for the English muffins. I'll just fry them in butter in a pan. The only time I would do the toaster

is if I'm making for a bunch of people and I want the toast to be going at the same time that I'm making the other stuff, so I don't have to worry about it. I just put them in the toaster and push the button. But yeah, no, I agree. If I'm just making it like for me and my kids or just a few people, toast the English muffins in the pan.

Exactly. Especially if it's a fresh English muffin and all you're just trying to do is get a little edge and crisp on it, the pan is fine for that. Kenji, can you get eggs Benedict out of kids clothes? Yes. It's not the easiest.

It'll come out though. They can definitely make a right mess of these things. Yeah. It's the butter that. It'll come out though. They can definitely make a right mess of these things. Yeah. Very messy dish. Yeah. It's the butter that gets in there. Yeah. That's it for today's episode, but we want to hear from you. Is there another recipe or food you want us to chat about? Any comments or questions about

this week's dish? Tell us at TheRecipePodcast.com or at Kenji and Deb. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. Yuri Lasordo is the managing producer. Emmanuel Johnson is the audience engagement manager, and the executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich.

Thanks for listening. Audrey Martavich. Thanks for listening.