Emulsions!

I have a habit to confess - a breakfast habit. Every weekend I go to breakfast with a few friends from uni at a different cafe in town. But this week, when it came time to choose the cafe, I had to confess that I might skip the meal in order to save money. So instead we decided to cook our own cafe breakfast of the usual cafe fare - eggs Florentine, coffee, and a dessert of French toast.

After stopping at the market to get fresh eggs and bread, I bussed over to my friend Laura's house. First off Laura made a salsa for the eggs of simmered tomatoes, garlic, and a few other bibs and bobs. I wasn't paying close attention because I was working on the Hollandaise.

Kiwis love their Hollandaise. Every cafe I have visited here serves eggs Benedict and eggs Florentine. Since Laura is vegetarian we opted for the latter, which is poached eggs on toast with spinach and hollandaise. Eggs Benedict involves ham or bacon instead of spinach.

What makes hollandaise one of my favorite sauces is that it is an emulsion, a lovely little miracle of food chemistry also found in mayonnaise and butter. It is defined as a mixture of two unmixable substances, in this case oil and water in the form of butter, eggs, water, and lemon juice. Oil and water come together with the emulisfier lecithin, found in the egg yolks.

I took the recipe I used off of Alton Brown (of the Food Network) for a simple sauce. Laura had a German one that involved white wine and shallots but I'm a traditionalist when it comes to my sauces.

Anyway, after lots of whisking of egg yolks and water, and melting in the butter bit by bit (with more whisking) I had a very sore right arm and a delicious pot of hollandaise. We then tried to poach eggs like I had seen on Gordon Ramsey's show "the F Word", by dropping the raw eggs into swirling boiling water, but they ended up looking a bit messier that his.



Hopefully practice makes perfect. The assembled dishes, with toast, spinach, egg and sauce looked a bit slap-dash but tasted right on. And the lovely things about making your own breakfasts are that there are free refills on coffee (which never happens in NZ) and there's always more Hollandaise for that second piece of toast...

Making a bit of French toast afterwards used up the egg white from the eggs Florentine nicely, and I wouldn't have had dessert if we were out - usually I just try a bit of my compatriots' dessert and have a bit of extra coffee (I'm still not totally converted to the European style of eating in courses!). It's really nice to have a big meal with friends to look forward to on the weekend, and now I'm looking forward to trying some new recipes as well.