The context

I love eggs benedict. But I hate dishes. And I don’t even know how to make hollandaise, but I learned from my Grampy that it’s gotta be real, and gotta be fresh; definitely can’t be frozen or canned. Which presents a conundrum: I can’t make eggs benedict.

Except, it turns out, with some judicious ingredient hacking, I can.

To make this work, I rely on a three things:

• the inherent richness and tastiness of salted butter
• some extra salt from some decent bacon
• the delightfulness of crumpets

The salted butter and bacon compensate pretty well for the flavor of the hollandaise, and the yolk does most of the texture work. And cutting out the hollandaise does make it a slightly less waist-line hating meal.

Recipe

Ingredients

• fresh egg
• crumpet
• 1 slice of bacon
• small slice of butter

Method

Multiply the ingredient list by the number of piles of crumpet/bacon/egg goodness you want to produce. I usually make two.

Start frying your bacon. Chewier is better for this. Boil water for poaching the egg. Get the crumpet(s) into the toaster, but don’t start yet.

When you flip the bacon, pop the crumpets down in the toaster, and start poaching your egg(s) (google is your friend here–seriously first two hits, and I think one of them is Jamie Oliver).

Once the crumpets come out, put a slice of butter on each one, and when the bacon is ready cut/break each strip in half and criss-cross them on top of the butter so it definitely melts (!important).

As the eggs come out, put them on top of the bacon.

Eat.

Thoughts again

So, it’s stupidly easy. Takes about 10 minutes for 2, including interspersing the process with aeropressing some coffee (grinding it too).

Technically, this isn’t eggs benedict. Hence the half-a-dict term. Also, technically it’s a variation on eggs blackstone (streaky bacon instead of ham… you didn’t think I meant Canadian bacon did you? Because I’m not Canadian, English, or crazy).

You could also do the same thing for all the benedict variations, though YMMV:

• Royale: Eggs Rpublican (also known as Eggs Hemingway, which we’ll call Eggs Pynchon)
• Florentine: Eggs Angeleno
• Hebridean (black pudding): Eggs Buchanan¹

Congratulations. You have a delicious breakfast (or other meal), and probably 2 dishes to clean, plus some utensils and a plate.

nomnomnomnomnom

Update 2017-01-06

An easy way to poach eggs is to use saran wrap (cling-film for the anglophone audience). Check out this page for a (photo heavy) breakdown on how to do it. It’s pretty great.