My most recent at home assignment for culinary school was to make eggs benedict and a side, take photos and report back on it for class next Monday. Of course me being me I couldn't just make a traditional eggs benedict, I had to change it up a bit. I decided that I would do eggs benedict two ways, savory and dessert.
For my savory version I decided on crawfish cake eggs benedict with tarragon hollandaise sauce. Traditional eggs benedict calls for english muffins as a base, but I decided to change it up and make cheddar garlic biscuits instead.
Next I made my crawfish cakes. This was a basic crab cake recipe that I added a little red pepper and green onion to and replaced the crab with crawfish.
Then I started poaching my eggs while I made the hollandaise sauce. I just made a traditional hollandaise sauce but I threw in a little chopped tarragon at the end. My eggs poached for about 4-5 minutes and then I took them out and assembled my eggs benedict. I sliced the top off a biscuit and added a crawfish cake on top. I topped that with two poached eggs and some of the hollandaise sauce.
The overall flavor was pretty good. I enjoyed the biscuit more than an english muffin because it soaked up some of the sauce. The crawfish cake was nice and crispy on the outside so that replaced the crunch that the traditional toasted english muffin would have offered. My eggs may have been a little overdone but I don't like too much yolk so they were perfect for me. If I had the time I probably would have tried the sauce again. The flavor was good but it was too thin and ran off onto the plate instead of coating the eggs like it should have. I think this would hold under heat for a little while but I wouldn't want it to sit too long.
Because a normal side dish was a little boring for me, and because I have such a soft spot for desserts I decided to do an eggs benedict dessert to complete the assignment. I love making desserts that look like other things so I spent most of last night contemplating how I could make a dessert look like this traditional breakfast dish. I started by making some mini tart shells to resemble the english muffin part of the dish.
I wanted something pink to resemble the canadian bacon layer of the traditional dish so I whipped up a raspberry curd to fill the tart shell with. The trickiest part was coming up with something to represent the egg layer. I really wanted something that I could stuff so when I broke into the dessert it would have a yellow center just like the poached egg. I decided on meringues. I piped them out into an egg shape and baked them. After they finished the baking and drying process I poked a hole in the side and filled the hollow inside with lemon curd. This ended up working great because when the meringue shell was broken the lemon curd flowed out with a similar texture of the egg yolks on the traditional dish.
Finally I was to the hollandaise portion of the dish and I had decided on a lemon pastry cream to take the place of the sauce in my dessert. I made a traditional pastry cream but replace some lemon zest for the vanilla bean and added in just a little fresh lemon juice at the end. I also replaced regular sugar with brown sugar. I don't know if that made much of a difference but I had used the last of my white sugar on my meringues so that's all I had. I didn't let the pastry cream set up completely in the fridge so it had more of a sauce like consistency.
This turned put pretty good but I would change a few things in the future. I should have let the raspberry curd set up overnight because it was a bit too thin but the flavor was good. I also would have made my meringues much smaller because they kind of overtook the dessert.
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