Oeufs pochés ... échec

The French language is so beautiful! Oeufs pochés ... échec certainly looks a lot better than Poached Eggs... Fail. Late Sunday morning, I finally took on the poached eggs recipe and attempted to make Eggs Benedict with asparagus for brunch. Maybe 'Fail' is too harsh, because it wasn't entirely bad... just not up to my own personal expectations. I often find myself having too high of hopes for my cooking. I let it get to me when something doesn't turn out right. But I'm trying to accept and anticipate that I won't always get it right the first time, but I will always have a second time to try again.

Continued after the jump...

While standing at my kitchen counter sipping my coffee, I read through the steps to properly poach the eggs about 100 times. Then reading over the Hollandaise recipe. I made sure to get all my ingredients set out and tried to organize my thoughts. I kept running through the poaching steps in my head as I juiced my lemon and separated my yolks from eggs for the Hollandaise. OK... I was ready.

Julia suggested fresh eggs are important for a good poach. The white clings to the yolk better when they are fresh. She also advised if my eggs were a few days old (which mine were) to simmer them in their shells for 8-10 seconds before poaching to help stiffen up the whites. So I did exactly that, I took my four eggs placed them in the simmering water and counted: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8. I pulled them out, cooled them to the touch with water and got to poaching. I cracked one at a time, concentrating on my wooden spoon as I tried to push the egg whites back toward the yolk in a gentle sweeping motion. The more I tried, the more I freaked out.

My simmering water was quickly beginning to look like egg drop soup with strings of egg whites floating EVERYWHERE.

I didn't give up, just as Julia said I moved right on to the next egg and let the prior egg finish cooking the rest of the 3 minutes she had suggested. The time quickly ran out and I pulled the eggs out of the pot and into a bath of cold water they went. Doing so I thought, the cold water will stop the cooking and rinse off the vinegar. Oh no, the vinegar!!! I completely forgot to put the vinegar in the simmering water before I started poaching. The vinegar helps them hold their shape. No wonder my eggs were running everywhere, they are a few days old and I forgot the vinegar. :/  But at least they had somewhat of a poached look with the whites in a little oval, covering most of the yolk when I was done. 

Even though I had the poaching catastrophe, I kept on cooking. I already had my asparagus in the oven and toasted my English muffins. So I quickly warmed the thick-sliced ham on a skillet and started the Hollandaise sauce. I felt good about the sauce, after all I had two other sauces this week to practice on (the Béarnaise & the Brown Tarragon sauces).

I plated all the food and poured some mimosas. It was actually starting to looking ok so we sat down to eat.
As soon as I cutting into my Eggs Benedict, found I over poached the eggs. The yolk was not runny at all. It was almost as if I had hard boiled them, but instead with a fluffy white. I'm not sure what happened here. I followed the time structure just as Julia had described. Maybe with all the whites running off, there was less egg left to protect the yolk from cooking through?

But despite it all: the horrible poaching & the hard cooked egg yolk, it wasn't really that bad. The sauce was fantastic, and together with the English muffins and ham finishing up the Benedict and the asparagus, it was a good honest attempt. And David cleared his plate, so that has to be worth something. :)

BUT WATCH OUT EGGS: I'll be back and ready to poach again! Someday...

(Recipes courtesy of Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 1)