I just wanted to pass along some information, of which most of you are likely unaware:
Every time you order eggs benedict, God kills a puppy.
That’s all I have to say about that.
Most restaurants, it seems he kills a stick of margarine too; or worse, some packet of unholy powder.
Every time you make it at home, with butter, Jesus lets his belt out a notch.
People have no idea what a bitch it is to make from scratch.
And then there is that 4 minute window of opportunity to eat it while everything is exactly the right temperature and texture…
Here.
Have a blueberry muffin instead and just shut up.
I only get the chance for Eggs Benedict about once a year. I avail myself of those opportunities.
Batpuckey! Shut up and cook, pot-jockey! That’s what you get paid the big bucks for. And if it isn’t perfect, I’m sending it back!
Poach an egg, toast some English muffins, fry up some Canadian bacon and spoon on some Hollandaise. What the hell is the big deal? Should be a gimme in the kitchen.
It’s not that difficult, but it does take a bit of finesse. One, you have to be comfortable with making Hollandaise. Some people find this to be next to impossible. I don’t count that crap that comes powdered in packets as “hollandaise.”
Second, you have to know how to poach an egg. Many people–and diners–don’t know how to poach a egg. I’ve been to restaurants that serve Eggs Benedict with a fried egg. Morons.
Three, assuming that you don’t screw up the muffin and the Canadian bacon, you have to time everything just right, so the Hollandaise, muffins, bacon, and eggs come out warm and fresh.
It’s not terribly difficult, but it’s not a project for a beginning cook.
Go ahead and denounce me as a heretic, but I make my eggs benedict with smoked salmon instead of canadian bacon. If you put some vinegar in the water, the poached eggs hold together very nicely.
If it was easy to make, I’d make it at home.
But trying to get the yolk mixed tons of butter with it getting all clumpy is what I pay y’all for.
So quit bitching and make me some hollandaise sauce! 
Count me in with silenus. I pay somebody to cook something I cannot, will not, or choose not to cook myself.
If that’s true, and I had a nickel for every time I heard that, I would have $0.05, and probably about 50 dead puppies on my hands, because I order eggs benedict whenever I go out for breakfast.
But seriously, I had no idea it was so exceptionally difficult to make, and am glad to be clued in now. Next time I’ll be more grateful for the opportunity to ingest such juicy jentacular gems…
Actually, looking through a few recipes, I doubt that it’s harder to cook than a truly-excellent full English breakfast. I know a fairly-successful Malaysian chef who rates it as the best test of a cook’s ability to judge timings. There’s a bare minimum of half-a-dozen items, all with different cooking times & requirements, none of which can be ignored for a length of time, and none of which should be left to stand once finished.
I agree. Which is why I almost never go to steakhouse or order steak. I can do it just as well (for much cheaper, to boot) as 99% of all the restaurants out there.
silenus and GorillaMan, I hope those with whom you dine do not complain too loudly when they have to wait far longer than necessary for their own breakfasts because your poached eggs are bogarting a burner for a span of time in which I could have fried five or more sets of eggs.
However, silenus, I award you an extra 150 experience points for making your point in a lighthearted manner. Good roleplaying - appropriate to the mood of the campaign.
GorillaMan, the gnome wizard gestures, flinging a pinch of fine sand in your direction while uttering unfamiliar words. Roll a Will save. Hmmm - an eleven isn’t going to do it. You feel your eyelids growing heavier, and you can barely move your feet. Your sword slips from your weary fingers and falls to the ground, and your thoughts drift to your bed back home in Ceciltown. You’re getting sleeeeeeeeepy…
Anyway, eggs benedict is not difficult to make - at least not for a cook with my years of experience. It’s just aggravatingly time consuming - at least when compared to other common breakfast foods. And when one item takes way longer than other items, it can bring a resturant kitchen to a screeching halt - or at least slow everything down quite a bit.
The other problem with eggs benedict is its “layered” nature. This is a problem when somebody doesn’t like they way the eggs are poached (like the guy this morning who forgot to mention that he wanted his eggs poached “medium”). If somebody’s fried eggs are wrong - say they wanted over medium and I cooked them over easy - all I have to recook are the eggs. If the eggs are done wrong with eggs benedict, though, I pretty much have to do the whole damn thing all over again.
In any case, I don’t intend for this to become a Pit thread (I already have another restaurant-related topic in mind for that forum), so be nice 
I was once served eggs Benedict made with chicken gravy. Never again.
I don’t care if eggs come from chickens. Never again.
Oh yes, and I’ve never met another breakfast cook who likes making eggs benedict. Just poached eggs by themselves are enough to get most of us cussing 
Ahhhh, well if the difficulty of remaking the thing is the problem, what you need is the British culture of never complaining about the food, even when you’ve found a deep-fried mouse underneath the egg 
What do you actually charge for eggs benedict, and for other cooked breakfast items? Does it reflect the burden it places on everyone?
You are not a heretic. Eggs Benedict with Salmon is absolute OK in my book. Nay, it’s fantastic.
:eek:
What happens when you order eggs florentine?
Mmmm… French food! I’m actually of Scottish extraction (Why Scottish take-out will never work: “Aye, we c’n do it fer ye, but it’ll take at least thrrrree 'ours to boil all the flavor oot!”) My Scottish forebears can be blamed for discovering oatmeal. Now, I actually like oatmeal (with creamy peanut butter and raisins - yummy!) but I have sworn a solemn vow that I will never, never, ever, under any circumstances pay somebody else to cook it for me.
The price does not reflect the extra labor, at least not in the places I’ve had to cook it. It’s been priced similarly to the rest of the menu items. The problem is that most restaurants these days seem to be owned by people who have never actually had to do the work themselves, and so prices are set strictly based upon how much the ingredients cost.
Beware of Doug - Chicken gravy??? Ye gods! Somebody needed to be horsewhipped over that!
I will confess that the restaurant in which I currently toil uses a mix for the hollandaise. Making it from scratch and to order is fine when you’ve got an sous chef there to do that while another cook prepares the other ingredients, and the customers are there to “dine” rather than eat-and-run. But it’s out of the question in a cramped kitchen with one cook and customers who start bellyaching if their food isn’t in front of them five minutes after they ordered it.