Eggs Benedict with Asparagus

Eggs Benedict, or Oscar Benedict, or my own version between those two. Good morning, it’s Easter Saturday! And only for celebrating the four-days holiday I decided to prepare a nice home brunch. Last night I made a dinner for me and S, the main course being Finnish whitefish and mashed potatoes with white wine sauce. The result was rather disappointing, I will tell you later about it. So my hopes were not that high when I started to prepare the brunch: poached eggs with hollandaise sauce and asparagus.

To be honest, this was my first time ever preparing the very original Hollandaise. I have made before something similar, with less chance to ruin it completely. But this time it was fo’ real. And it turned out perfectly! As did the poached eggs! S was on a computer doing stuff, and sometimes asking what’s happening in the kitchen when he could only hear happy shouts of joy - like “ahh! beautiful! deliccccciouussss! I made it!”

For both Hollandaise and poached eggs I used a video recipe by a Finnish daily newspaper. That helped a lot more than just reading the recipe, so probably would be a good thing to do if you’re not familiar with the preparation style.

So here’s my version of eggs benedict. With this I served a self-baked pita bread, even traditionally you should have your eggs benedict with an English muffin. Also toast would do!

Enjoy the Easter days with good brunches!

Almost Eggs Benedict with Asparagus (for 2)

A small bunch of green asparagus, washed and ends trimmed if necessary

salt

Bring water to a boil in a tall saucepan and add salt. Place the bunch of asparagus into the water, ends down. Cook asparagus (bound together with a rubber band) for around 2-3 minutes. Serve immediately.

Poached eggs:

2 liters water

1 dl spirit vinegar

2-3 eggs

Bring water almost to a boil in a wide saucepan. Keep the heat relatively low, if you let it boil, you will get scrambled eggs instead of poached. Add vinegar.

Crack each egg into a cup individually. Don’t break the yolk. 

Create a whirlpool in the saucepan by spinning the water around for a few rounds with a wooden spoon. 

Place the cup with an egg very close to the surface of the water and drop the egg at once in the middle of the whirlpool.

Keep giving the water a gentle spin every now and then, so that the egg keeps slightly moving all the time. It’s ready when the egg white is set, for a few minutes. The yolk is supposed to be runny so don’t overcook.

Lift the eggs out of the pan and place on a paper towel to drain.

Repeat with the rest of the eggs.

Hollandaise sauce:

2 tablespoons lemon juice

3 egg yolks

150 g butter

salt, pepper

In a saucepan or microwave melt half of the butter. Collect the white whey off the butter so that it becomes clear yellow in color.

Place a small, thick-bottomed saucepan on a stove over a very low heat. I heated my electric stove for 10 minutes with the lowest heat and then turned it off, using the after heat to make the sauce. You can also use bain marie, but be careful not to heat it too hot. If you use too high heat the eggs will cook and the sauce curdle.

Add lemon juice and the yolks in the pan and start stirring constantly. Do not stop but keep whisking for 5 minutes or until the mixture starts to get thicker and is very light yellow in color.

Keep whisking vigorously and add first the melted butter in a thin string in to the pan. When all incorporated add the firm butter in cubes, still whisking (I know this asks for some muscles, eh).

When all is incorporated, let warm up a bit, then spice with salt and pepper and serve on top of toasted bread, poached eggs and asparagus.

Pasha, Russian Easter Dessert

First of all, let me start with my amusement caused by the fact that in English the traditional Russian Easter dessert I’m going to present here is called pashka. Now there’s a reason I am going to use the Finnish (& original Russian) name pasha for this delicious dessert, as the English one doesn’t really make justice to it. Why? Because in Finnish pashka means something that comes out of you after you have eaten your pasha, so we better not go further with that.

Last Easter I blogged about the traditional Finnish Easter dessert mämmi, which is made of rye flour, malts and sugar, and typically served with double cream. But pasha…my favorite of all the Easter desserts. Originating from Russia and into the Orthodox Christian Easter tradition it has also found its way to Finland probably centuries ago. Many might know we have a lot of Russian influence here after being under the Russian rule in the 19th century, and pasha is one of those. In Russia pasha is traditionally prepared on Good Friday and enjoyed as a dessert or with afternoon coffee, typically with kulich, a sweet Easter cake. 

The recipe of pasha varies depending on who does the treat and where. The two main ingredients, however, stay. They are butter and quark, a thick, sour and very low-fat milk product, typical here in the North. Actually I think I have mentioned quark in my other posts too, wondering what it might be called in other countries. Might also be cottage cheese in the US, for example. Am I any right? With the main ingredients there are many ways to spice pasha, most common of which are orange, lemon (especially the dried and sugared pieces of lemon peel), raisins and nuts or almonds.

Before starting to make pasha, it’s good to know that this version of it is not a “mix & go” type of a dessert. It’s very quick to prepare, but has to drain at least overnight (mine did for 16 hours and could drain even more). So you need also a cheese cloth and a coffee filter to do the draining.

It was the first time for me to prepare this silky dessert, so I modified the original recipe a little bit to suit better my own taste. The recipe can be found here (in Finnish).

Russian Easter Pasha

100 g butter, slightly softened

1 dl sugar

1 egg

200 g quark

2 dl heavy whipping cream

juice of 1/2 lemon

1 heaping tablespoon orange marmalade

2 teaspoons vanilla

1/2 dl almond chips or crushed almonds

(1/2 dl raisins)

Lemon/orange peel and almonds to decorate.

Whip the cream until soft peaks lightly form. Using an electric mixer cream together butter and sugar until light in color.

Mix into the butter mixture all the other ingredients and beat gently to incorporate everything.

Line two small or one big steady coffee filter with damp cheese cloth. Spoon the mixture in it until the very top of the filter. Fold the rest of the cheese cloth on the mixture and top with a heavy weight.

Place the filter in a plastic jar where it doesn’t hit the bottom. The excess liquid will drain into the jar without making the pasha wet.

Let drain in a refrigerator for at least 12 hours. Pasha is at its best on the next day.

Finnish Easter dessert, Mämmi

We Finns love holidays (who wouldn’t). Even we’re very conscientious workers we surely try to have as many days off-duty during the year as possible. Easter is a good example. It’s a four-day holiday, when all the places (markets, banks, post offices, liquor stores) are closed. So to speak, for us this Monday after the Easter Sunday is still a holiday when we can stay at home, petting our artificial Easter chicks and eating the leftover food from the weekend.

One of the most peculiar dishes in the Finnish Easter table is a dessert called “mämmi”. Mämmi is a pudding-like dish, that is made of rye flour, malt and sugar. Mämmi is most often served with heavy cream, vanilla sauce and/or sugar and it’s very rich and tasty in all its simplicity. It’s almost black in color which might make it seem a little bit suspicious for people unfamiliar with the dish. Actually, some Finnish people find it funny to present this delicacy to foreigners in a humorous way, as many people get some, ermh, particular connotations from it. I don’t think that’s so hilarious at all, as I love this dessert and am proud of the Finnish food culture in general.

There are several recipes for mämmi, but as I have never tried to prepare it myself, I rather not give any tips about which would be the best way to do it. Instead, when you have found your way to prepare mämmi, you must try the following dessert, that takes your mämmi to a new level of deliciousness. The recipe is taken from a Finnish lifestyle magazine Kodin Kuvalehti (in Finnish). 

Layered Mämmi Mousse (serves 4)

300g mämmi

200ml double cream, whipped

250g fromage frais/quark/curd cheese

100ml caster sugar

1/2 teaspoon ginger powder

canned peach or grated orange peel, for garnish

Using an electric mixer, mix together whipped cream, fromage frais (or a substitute), sugar and ginger until smooth.

Spoon 3 tablespoons of mämmi on the bottom of your dessert cups. Top with a similar layer of the cream mixture. Add one more layer of mämmi and of cream mixture on top. 

Garnish with chopped fruit or grated orange peel.