Poached eggs on homemade whole wheat bread, spinach and tomato

My own bread made the usual way overnight, low yeast, no knead. Honestly, I cannot find anything better to buy. 

Parmigiano Reggiano, the real deal. There is a world of difference between imported and domestic brands that has to do with time and care and cost of production.

Tomatoes from Tony's Market. They have some deal with farmers. Garden tomatoes that taste as tomatoes should.

This meal is so simple and delicious I can hardly stand it. There is a breakfast restaurant a few blocks away called Dozens. They've been in business decades now. I've been there many times with friends and if they served anything close to good as this then I would go there more often. But they don't. They do not hold a candle to what I can do myself. I am amazed they are still around. There is evident passion evident. 

Why doesn't image search for [dozens denver]  fill the whole page? And go on and on and on, as it should? Because nobody bothered to photograph, that's why, not even themselves. Wouldn't you want your images out there as a matter of attracting business? 

Conversely, image search ["thingswotImadethenate"] shows what I mean. Not all of the photos are mine but most of them are, and the rest link back to me. And I am just a regular bloke, not a business to mind. 

Pinto beans, poached eggs, kiwi salad, honey mustard dressing

Pinto beans are popular around here but I never do see them cooked this way and I honestly do not understand why not. 

Polenta, poached eggs, bacon

Poached eggs, polenta, bacon and mushroom salad, red wine sauce

Oeufs en Meurette, considered a difficult thing I think because there are so many pots involved but it's actually easy because the separate elements are done in advance and assembled to plate thus the dish is favored in restaurants.

Except for the eggs.

It is possible. Easy too. You can poach eggs in advance and hold in chilled water. Then doused again in hot water to re-impart heat which only takes a second or two with a slotted spoon. But you have to overcome the unease of holding a bowl of some twenty-four or so tender chilled poached eggs. One wrong move and blam yolk all over the place.

Meurette amounts to red wine sauce reduced to syrup its acid mitigated with puréed carrots. And right off one thinks of a good use for a jar of baby food although you won't see that on any recipes. Carrots cannot be cooked in the wine as the acid will toughen the carrot cells and prevent them from blending. Reduced wine, puréed carrot, shallot, butter, it's a very nice sauce used for fish and for eggs. 

The other nice thing about it is onion confit. In my mind they substitute for a pile of noodles. Here they are hidden under polenta which isn't customary, and under sauce, but the onions are there.

Sautéed mushrooms as well

And lardons, bacon here. 

So you need separate pots and pans for

* slowly sautéing onions

* reducing a bottle of red wine
* softening carrots, this is separate due to acid

* frying lardons, bacon or ham

* sautéing mushrooms

* polenta (here, but not usual) 

* toasting croûtes, little toast rounds as platforms for poached egg, if they're used, but not here
* poaching eggs

So that's a lot of pots.

Once you've made all that mess there you are, you can clean it all up, and then you can assemble things at will. So the stabilized sauce and onions and lardons and toasted croûtes and poached eggs on hold are all good for buffets brunches and such. But if you do, use better bowls than this. Those half-plate half-bowl things are nice.

Apologies for the photo, they are all bad, the lens has no vibration control. 

Breakfast, poached eggs, potato

This breakfast makes use of leftover potatoes baked Friday night for a dinner party. The potatoes were hidden, wrapped in a kitchen towel, on the dining room table, sitting there all Saturday. Today is Easter Sunday late afternoon. They are very small, here are two of them chopped up.

These were the most cooperative poached eggs to date. A shallow pot of water was brought to the boil while the chill was taken off refrigerated eggs by resting briefly in a sink of hot tap water. As you well know by now, water boils at 10° cooler at Denver than it does as sea-level, even more cooler in the foothills, and cooler yet at altitude. So boiling water here is 202° even though it is boiling like mad and visibly evaporating like crazy. The pot is removed from the heat. Cider vinegar (only because there is a 1/2 gallon of it. The vinegar could be any kind at all) is carelessly dumped in quantity. I'd guess 1/4 cup or possibly even more. Not to worry, this will not make the eggs taste like vinegar. Almost all of it stays with the water. Very little of it stays with the egg, so don't hold back just because of that. The water is also salted. The egg is cracked into a ramekin then spilled into the hot water. One at a time, the whites of each of these eggs held together tightly, and none of the egg white stuck to the bottom of the pot. I'm usually not that lucky. 

Are they bee-you-tea-full or what?

Mexican queso blanco, which is surprisingly good. The kind that melts.

A simple gravy is whipped up in the same pan the potatoes were cooked.  Two or so teaspoons butter plus 1 teaspoon flour. Less flour than usual because cheese also thickens sauces. On the heat, commercial chicken broth is whisked in. The mixture boils furiously. Experts always tell you not to do this. Warm liquid into warm roux or they will insist cold liquid into warm roux off the heat. It's all nonsense. Just dump in the liquid and whisk immediately and all is forgiven. The only way you can go wrong is to not whisk immediately as you dump the liquid. Then adjust the liquid as necessary right there on the spot. At that point of adjustment you can even change liquids which has the benefit of adding depth and character to your sauce. I didn't do that today because every now and then I back off and become simple. 

The spices in the roux are the careless combination that was concocted last night for the hard-boiled Easter egg packages. There is an excess so I am using it now. What the heck, I love the stuff.  

Cheese is already a processed food. Cooking it tends to break it down, causes it to separate. We do not like that. Therefore, cheese is added off the heat. In this case, the pan was swirled to mix the cheese into the thickened broth. It never fully incorporated and had the appearance of cheese that separated, but that is a false impression. It never had a chance to fully melt much less to separate. 

Eggs in a nest in a tree

Poached eggs that is, in a nest of sweet onion and sweet bell pepper and rough-textured spaghetti, and a tree of Black Forest ham.  What can I say? The lad in me is still very alive and will not be shut up, so things like this happen. The leaves on the tree are basil, the nest is loosely held together with Asiago. 

The tree was almost a bacon tree, but the bacon is packaged and frozen and the sandwich ham was right there, so this is a sandwich ham tree. I'm lazy that way. 

Now here is the thing: the regulating adult in me allowed a splash of sake, which is a very strange ingredient indeed, but I tell you what, although it might be horrible on its own, especially the first sip, sake changes everything it touches in small amount. As you know, a dressing = oil + acid, so in those terms this nest is dressed with olive oil and butter, the pan that the vegetables were heated was steamed up at the end with water and sake leaving behind a trace of dressing, and it is a dressing that you would not imagine were your culinarily wandering not perverse. You are probably thinking, "Ho! wine and sake is alkaline, not acid," and that is right, and that is the reason why this thought is perverse. When regular wine oxidises it does turn acidic, and the sweeter the sake to begin with, the less alkaline it is. Chemistries! It is an odd pH thing happening that tends to linger on the tongue. At least I think that is the thing that is lingering, I could be wrong. At any rate, this sake idea is a win. On your next run to the bottle shop pick up some sake, even an inexpensive one, and it will alter your culinary experience permanently. It is convenient too, because once opened it can stay there on the countertop without deterioration until it is finally all used. Presently I am only on my second bottle, but already I have determined to never be without it. (Marsala is the second like substance not to be without, but that is best kept refrigerated.) 

At serving, the egg yolks broken open over the lightly dressed nest produces a kind of a sauce akin to carbonara. On the other hand, it also results in an unsightly mess on the plate, but then doesn't everything? 

To poach, the eggs were broken into a ramekin one at a time and gently tipped into barely simmering water that contained a generous dose of cider vinegar and salt. It is interesting and a little bit funny to watch the egg albumen start to spread throughout the water and then tighten up back into a compact mass surrounding the yolk. It is like the egg is recoiling in horror, "eeew, get me out of here, I hate this water."  Still, the albumen is a bit of a mess. The egg can be lifted out of the water, concentrating on preserving an unbroken yolk, with a slotted spoon or with a  large regular spoon, as these were lifted. Then trimmed around the edge of the spoon with an ordinary dinning knife. The eggs can be carried to a receiving bowl with warm water to halt the cooking process but still kept at temperature until serving. This is handy thing to know if you intend to prepare a large number of poached eggs in advance. Win the admiration of your peers by producing twenty plates of eggs Hollandaise all at once! Now you might be thinking that dripping wet eggs sounds unappetizing, but there is no problem with that even if you were to serve them on toast. 

I was going for a different cheese, but reaching into the cheese drawer, my fingertips touched this one first, and I thought, "Eh, what the heck." 

Poached eggs, potatoes, ham, red sauce

Dos huevos escalfados, papas, jamón, con salsa roja. 


To get a nice complete shred on those potatoes I dragged out the Cuisinart. Frrrrrap! Done.  They were rinsed to rid them of their surface starch, then boiled briefly. They were removed before they cooked completely. Then fried using the fat removed from these roasted chickens. They were sprinkled with sea salt, pepper, and powdered garlic. 


The eggs are poached in simmering water that contains salt and vinegar to keep the albumen together. In this instance the white did cohere but separately from the yolk. That was weird. Suited me, I like the yolk a lot more anyway. 


The ham is ordinary Black Forest ham from the deli. It was even already pre-cut in their cabinet, thicker than I usually specify, but that's okay with me too.


The red sauce was prepared earlier to moisten holdover enchiladas. It is made from ancho and arbol chiles. 

Poached eggs, hash brown potatoes

I wonder why vegetables are not more popular for breakfasts. This confounds me. Doesn't this look delicious? 

All of the celebrity chefs concur that Italian parsley tastes better than regular curly parsley, so that is what we see them use exclusively. This is the giant version of Italian parsley, and frankly, I find it to be too bitter. Me no likey bitter. So that does it! After this batch I'm switching to regular parsley. 

I tried something different this time with the potatoes. One potato, smallish for an Idaho Russet type, peeled then grated with a box grater directly into the sink filled 1/3 with cold water. The water clouded making visible the surface starch removed. Collected and pressed through a strainer then dumped into a bowl with seasoned melted butter and olive oil, along with half a white onion. 

So there's that.

The eggs were cracked into a ramekin and held while a small pan of water was brought to a boil. The same small pan that would fry an egg. The smallest pan. The water in the pan contained a lot of salt for that amount of water, probably one half teaspoon of kosher salt flakes, along with more cider vinegar than you might imagine, possibly up to two tablespoons. Those two things are necessary to hold together the albumen. Without salt AND vinegar, the egg white will spread throughout the water like a spreading maniacal egg white Bedouin that has completely lost all direction in life. No, wait, wait, wait. Spreadier than that. Without salt AND vinegar the egg white spreads like Paris Hilton spreads in 1 Night in Paris, a total mess. Dropped into acidulated brine like this, the white so tightens, in fact, apparently appalled at the hostile environment and recoiled in horror, that the egg white resists cooking through. Obviously, in simmering water the cooking temperature can not exceed 212℉ / 100℃, that is the whole point, even less at a mile altitude, 200℉ / 94℃. Cooking can be hastened then by spooning the simmering water over the white, in this case as above ↑ avoiding the yolk. For ART!

[Poached eggs can be lifted with a slotted spoon and transferred to a bowl of cold water to hold for hours. The salted vinegar water can be reused for poaching more eggs. (Alternately, a greater quantity of eggs can be poached thusly in the oven within a bain Marie.) For serving, the eggs can be gently reheated by lifting into hot water for a few seconds and -- BANG! --there it is, a dozen or more poached eggs all at once. Were you to pull this off for a brunch, you will be showered with accolades, elevated to hero status on the spot and paraded around on the shoulders of your peers, amongst much clamor and celebration. So be ready for all that.]

Poached eggs, Hollandaise

With spinach, Florentine, if you like. The spinach was marketed frozen and heated for a previous meal and something had to be done with it. I forget what it contains, I think just a splash of old red wine standing in for vinegar and whatever dried herbs I used at the time, whatever it was, it is still wonderful.  

I did not add onion, scallion, garlic, or any other allium because I'm a little bit tired of that right now. 

Why bother with English muffins when I have my own sturdy bread? And frankly, my bread is better.  

No ham was harmed for this dish, for presently I am hamless, nor prosciutto, and I did not  feel like frying bacon again so there's a noticeable  but not regrettable absence of that element.  

This was dinner. I consumed 1/2 stick of butter all by myself tonight, and I'm still dropping pounds. But I couldn't help it, you see,  the sauce was so light and smooth, so delicious, that it was irresistible, and there was no point in saving the little that remained so I ate it with a spoon. 

1. I discovered a new way to make Hollandaise that is quite simple and occurs naturally. The idea follows closely regular mayonnaise except butter for oil and lemon juice for vinegar, and no mustard, but come to think of it, that isn't a bad idea.  I used an immersion blender with the whisk attachment and a pint-size mason jar. Some flecks flick out of the jar when one is less than careful. I imagine the same thing could be done with a hand-held mixer with one of the beaters removed. Or an electric drill with a beater inserted instead of a drill bit. I tried a mini processor but that's noisy and didn't work very well, and I never tried a blender although I understand that's popular too. I just don't want to scrape it out around the blade for a small amount and I don't want to clean it. 

* 1 egg yolk

* 1/4 cup melted butter

* 2 tablespoons lemon juice (adjust to suit your taste)

* 1/16 teaspoon salt

* generous grind of pepper. 

As usual, blend the egg to smoothness, slowly drizzle the hot liquid butter. SLOWLY I SAID! Then less slowly as you go along, but still slowly.  Apparently I drizzled too fast because mine remained thin. The good thing was, I had a shallow pan of water already boiling for the poached eggs, so I could cook it as with a double boiler and thicken it up.  I set the jar inside the pan of water directly touching the water and the pan, which is unlike a proper double boiler, and whisked continuously until the temperature rose to 140℉ / 60℃ which took a few minutes.  I kept lifting the jar to ensure it didn't get too hot on the bottom but I'm not sure that was necessary. The result was the most amazing tasting soft texture silky  butter imaginable. I've honestly never tasted Hollandaise this good. Ever. Even prepared by pros. In fact, I don't trust them anymore. I'm imagining them in the back with an open gigantic #10 can of Hollandaise sauce kept warm in a ban marie. And if they're not, then what is their excuse for Hollandaise that's so sub par compared with my own? Huh? What? 

That does it!  I'm never ordering Hollandaise again unless it's to see how poorly theirs compares to mine.   *exhales on fingernails, buffs on shirt* 

To poach eggs use the same small non-stick pan you use to fry breakfast eggs.  Fill it 3/4 with water and bring to gentle boil. The trick is to add both salt and vinegar to the water. One or the other will not do, both are needed to cause the albumen to hold together tightly. As it begins to set, gently loosen the egg from the bottom of the pan with a spatula and let water flow under it. The egg does tend to stick, even though it's a non-stick pan. You can use a regular spoon to drizzle hot water over the top of the egg to hasten cooking. When done to suit you, lift the egg with a slotted spoon. If necessary, trim the edges by running a knife around the edges of a slotted spoon.  <-- I read that in Michel Roux's egg book but I never felt the need to do it.  

Say you're making a brunch for ten or twelve at home and blowing the minds and winning the admiration of your peers with your mad sauce-making and egg poaching skillz, only to mention the ease of your breezy presentation.  The eggs can be reserved in a bowl of cold water and lifted out when all the plates are assembled.  Then as the compliments are heaped upon you like rose petals, you can blush demurely and feign shyness while shrugging, "eh," and with a wave, "it just comes out of me."