ChefSteps

Cast-iron pan or skillet

Breville Die-Cast Smart Toaster™

Basting brush

Joule® Turbo Sous Vide

Egg(s)

Butter

Dill

Can be made several days in advance.Or hey, if you&#39;re not that into baking, just buy some English muffins at the store.

Prepare [English Muffin](http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/english-muffin)

Can be made several days in advance.

Prepare [Low-Temp Dungeness Crab](http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/low-temp-dungeness-crab)

Prepare the day of, and begin the cooking step.

Prepare [Hollandaise](http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/hollandaise)

Package eggs. After 16 minutes of cooking the Hollandaise, add the eggs to the bath. Cook sous vide at [c 75] for 14 minutes.Reduce water bath temperature to [c 70]. Continue with the Hollandaise recipe, then hold the finished sauce in the water bath until ready to serve.

Poach eggs

Slice English muffin in half, and lightly brush with melted butter.Brown insides of muffin in skillet or cast-iron pan over medium-high heat. Or, use a toaster.

Toast English muffins

Place 25 g of crab meat on each muffin.

Low-Temp Cooking Dungeness Crab

Plate crab

Plate egg

Coat each egg with desired amount of hollandaise.

Bright, Fluffy Whipped Hollandaise

Drizzle with Hollandaise

Garnish with a bit of fresh dill, and serve immediately.

Garnish and serve

Any cook who prepares Eggs Benedict from scratch will tell you that it&#39;s no easy task. Because we like a challenge, we set out to create the perfect Benedict recipe—and because we&#39;re from the Pacific Northwest, we added Dungeness crabmeat instead of ham. Yum.Mastering the art of the elevated breakfast and brunch classic involves a few modernist methods that allow you to control temperature and timing with superhuman precision. Creating a textbook poached egg, for example, is simple with a sous vide water bath set to 167 °F / 75 °C for 14 minutes. Here, we cook the eggs at a high temperature for a short amount of time (instead of at equilibrium temp for longer) to create a firm egg white that&#39;s very similar to a traditionally poached egg. We found that cooking the eggs at a lower temp for longer left us with overly runny whites—not ideal for Benedict. (With sous vide, you can play with different times and temperatures for any ingredient to discover best possible outcomes.) Likewise, notoriously tricky <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/hollandaise">Hollandaise</a> comes out creamy and velvety every single time when cooked sous vide and reserved in a whipping siphon on the day of service. Handmade <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/english-muffin">English Muffins</a> (it&#39;s worth the effort, trust us) soak up the egg and Hollandaise but remain firm. Extra-flavorful <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/low-temp-dungeness-crab">steamed crab</a> finishes the dish with a touch of briny NW elegance. Some elements can be prepared in advance (English muffins and crab meat), making it ever easier to create an impressive Benedict without all the fuss.

Crabby Eggs Benedict

People often associate steaming with bland health foods, but it’s actually a good way to retain flavor. Take shellfish: If you boil a crab in a pot of water, the natural sugars and savory amino acids abundant in the meat leach out into the water and flavor it. This is great for stocks, but not, clearly, the best way to keep the crab meat as flavorful as possible. Our solution: steam it, but at a low temperature to avoid overcooking the delicate meat. The flavorful molecules, which are water soluble, aren’t nearly as affected by steam. An added bonus is that low-temperature steaming in a SousVide Supreme is both easy and fast. When water vapor condenses on the crab’s shell, it releases a tremendous amount of latent heat energy that quickly cooks the crab. The same concept applies to other meats and to vegetables, so think twice before you boil those carrots.

Hollandaise—that bright, velvety concoction of egg yolks, butter, and lemon juice—has a reputation for being difficult to make. In part, that’s because overheating can make the delicate proteins in egg and butter unwind and lose their ability to emulsify, causing your sauce to break and become oily and thin. Even a sauce that comes out silky smooth and rich at first can quickly lose its appeal if allowed to cool too much. Timing, temperature, and proportion must be carefully controlled in order to yield hollandaise!Modernist technique goes a long way with this mother sauce: Sous vide cooking allows for convenient temperature control (and thus avoidance of overheating). Serving the sauce from a whipping siphon makes it easy to reserve until you’re ready to serve it but also aerates the mixture to order, lifting and lightening it for a softer, more delicate texture. We’re on a mission to change hollandaise’s bad reputation, starting with you.