The beloved hollandaise & a decadent crab cake benedict experience

by chloecrab

My friend Ginger and I decided we wanted to make ourselves a deliciously decadent brunch.  It turned into quite the ordeal. but I must say that it turned out amaaaaazing!  Ginger works at an awesome mushroom farm, so sometimes at the end of the farmers markets she gets to trade with the other stands and get amazing stuff so she brought over some crab cakes.  We decided we needed to make a crabcake benedict! So, of course, we had to make hollandaise.  I remember yessewilson making hollandaise sauce at home for us all many years ago, but I couldn’t totally remember how he did it.  Ginger is quite the purist and she refused to use my earth balance butter instead of real butter or to use a blender instead of a double-boiler either! So I got the fanciest ‘european style butter’ and we borrowed some pots to build a double-boiler from a neighbor. 

We also had some shallots/onion/garlic/greens to go with it!

We melted about one stick butter, boiled one pot of water to poach the eggs in, and boiled another smaller pot of water to serve as the bottom of the double boiler.  There was a lot going on at once.  

I separated the yolks from the whites (of four eggs).

We started sautéing the shallots and placed the crab cakes in the oven for about 15 minutes on 350 and finished it off by adding a healthy dab of butter and putting them under on broil for about 5 minutes at the end.

We then poached the 2 remaining eggs we had (oops, used too many in the hollandaise).  We slipped them into the water from bowls as carefully as we could but they still looked like a crazy stringy mess.  However, when we took them out a few minutes later they looked pretty near perfect!

For the sauce- first you whip the 4 egg yolks until they change to a thick consistency and double in size, then we added these into the melted butter that was over the double-boiler- adding a little at a time.  We also added the juice of one lemon, salt, pepper, and cayenne to our taste.

And continued to stir SUPERFAST

After the shallots had sautéed for about 5 minutes we added the garlic and spinach and tossed it in olive oil for a minute or two until the spinach was wilted to our satisfaction.

We were then ready to put it all together (on toasted and buttered gluten free bread!).

It was really awesome, though time consuming, and a bit hard to move afterwards!  The sauce was kind of the best ever and even better than it tastes at your average delicious brunch!

Next time I propose that we make the sauce in the Vitamix and see if it is as delicious as this labor-intensive method.

Thoughts?