The many eggs Benedict recipes on the Web are wildly variant. This page's selections must include meat, poultry, or fish, and must require sauce made from scratch (except for the Knauss Dried Beef recipe, which was too strange to omit). Instant hollandaise's inferiority is reviewed below.

If you know of another qualifying online recipe, please submit its URL.

Links to recipes (alphabetical by name of recipe)

• Asparagus Eggs Benedict. An odd-sounding mess of cheesy, broth-based hollandaise with asparagus.
• Canyon Road Eggs Benedict. With guacamole mayonnaise sauce instead of hollandaise.
• Crab Eggs Benedict.With crab legs. Photo. From EEE Cooks.
• Dundalk Eggs Benedict. Uses sausage, cilantro cream, and tortillas. From rec.food.recipes.
• Easy Eggs Benedict. Uses Pepperidge Farm Frozen Puff Pastry Shells and beaten eggs. From Campbell's Kitchen.
• Easy Eggs Benedict. Calls for turkey ham and a yogurt, mayonnaise, and mustard sauce instead of hollandaise. Originally from Kraft.
• Easy Eggs Bernaise. With cheddar cheese and Bernaise sauce.
• Eggs Benedict. From Food TV and the lovely Sara Moulton.
• Eggs Benedict. With croissants, spinach and Canadian bacon, and cheese, plus lime juice in the hollandaise. From Farmer John (a Canadian bacon producer).
• Eggs Benedict. From Knauss Dried Beef.
• Eggs Benedict. Inside "puff pastry." From tntn.essortment.com.
• Eggs Benedict. With mustard in the hollandaise. From Angel of the Sea Inn.
• Eggs Benedict. With pancetta and a final broiling, plus a link to "foaming hollandaise." Photo. From Delia Online.
• Eggs Benedict. In Danish. From Webline.
• Eggs Benedict. With grated Swiss cheese. From Culinary Café.
• Eggs Benedict, Cajun Country Style with Lazy Cajun Hollandaise Sauce from Emile L. Stieffel's Custom Catering site.
• Eggs Benedict Pizza. From the Homemade Gourmet Pizza page of CMJ's Home Page.
• Eggs Benedict Redux. A 318-calorie half-portion version for people with diabetes, using reduced-calorie oat bran bread, smoked salmon, and nonfat yogurt. With photo. From Cooking with Pam.
• Eggs Benedict with Creamy Hollandaise Sauce. With cubed English muffins and cheese, baked in ramekins. From Bed & Breakfast Inns Online. A recipe often found on the Web.
• Eggs Benedict without Real Eggs. Uses "cholesterol-free egg product" and evaporated milk to make the hollandaise to cover frozen waffles on which sit . . . real poached eggs! From the Searchable Online Archive of Recipes.
• Eggs Hussarde. Cajun recipe calls for Holland rusks instead of English muffins, and marchand de vin sauce in addition to hollandaise. From the Creole and Cajun Recipe Page.
• Eggs Neptune with Orange Hollandaise. With crabmeat and orange hollandaise sauce. From metro.isp and the Solution Group's Recipes Online.
• Farmhouse Eggs Benedict. With red-pepper cornbread and rosemary hollandaise. From Cliffside Inn Bed and Breakfast.
• Fox Breakfast. Sliced smoked chicken, tomato, and broccoli on croissant halves with poached eggs and roasted bell pepper hollandaise. From the Gables Inn.
• KISS [Keep It Simple Stupid] Eggs Benedict. A sloppy approach told gushingly. From CondéNet's Epicurious Food's Gail's Recipe Swap.
• Lobster Eggs Benedict. From the Food Network.
• Microwave Eggs Benedict. We don't need no steenking poaching! From Culinaria.
• Monte Cristo Eggs Benedict. A takeoff on the "Monte Cristo" sandwich (turkey and Swiss cheese coated in an egg batter and grilled). From Sunset magazine.
• Pacific Eggs Benedict. With smoked fish, lime slices, and cilantro lime hollandaise. From Kalani Oceanside Retreat.
• Poached Eggs and Tomato on Bacon and Potato Pancakes. With basil hollandaise. From the Applewood Inn.
• Quail Eggs Benedict and Caviar. From the Food Network.
• Seared Tuna Fish Benedict. With quickly seared fresh tunafish steaks, tartare butter, and a béarnaise sauce for a tarragon-flavored finish. With photo. From Gary Rhodes.
• Shortcut Eggs Benedict. With cream of chicken soup and milk substituting for eggs in hollandaise. From Commisso's Food Market.
• Smoked Salmon Benedict. With red onion confit and balsamic beurre blanc sauce. With photo. From foodwine.com.
• Tex-Mex Eggs Benedict. With black beans, cheese, and cream cheese, plus salsa instead of hollandaise. From Seasoned Cooking.
• Tucson Eggs Benedict. With sausage, cilantro cream, and salsa. From the National Hot Dog And Sausage Council.

Wines

According to Wine Cuisine magazine, the wines that best accompany eggs Benedict are Chablis, St-Véran, Sancerre, Brut Champagne, and Brut Rose.

Other eggs Benedict appreciation

Brunch.org. A beautifully designed, well written site obsessing over eggs Benedict and steak au poivre. It reviews restaurant offerings in New York and a few other cities, using a creative scale for judging quality.

Eggs Benedict: the Sumptuous Stack. By Jennifer Anderson. With recipe. From All Recipes.

Eggs Benedict Still Reigns Supreme. With recipe. From the Christian Science Monitor (whose theology is no more healthful than this entrée).

Instant hollandaise

Several of the above recipes include instructions for homemade hollandaise sauce. It is not an easy sauce, for it requires gently indirect heat, a fine balance of egg yolk and butter, and the risk of salmonellosis. But eggs Benedict deserves no less. Instant, powdered hollandaise, such as those reviewed below, can never approximate the real thing.

McCormick. The packet's powder smells of egg and sawdust. The sauce is prepared by blending the powder with half a stick of melted butter, then adding a cup of water, and then stirring it while first raising the temperature to a boil, then lowering it to a simmer, till thickened. It turns a dark yellow after cooking.

The egg (solids) and the lemon (juice solids) in the mix could both be tasted. But before the two listed egg ingredients are wheat starch and maltodextrin. The latter is a bland "bulking aid" used to increase the volume of dry food mixes. It is a powder with a high surface area for adsorbing oils and fats. You taste the egg and lemon through those two main ingredients of this gelatinous sauce, which clumps badly upon cooling. The tangy lemon flavor is only an aftertaste, and appears simultaneously with the usual graininess of any instant sauce that thins upon the tongue.

McCormick ingredients: Wheat starch, maltodextrin, egg yolk solids, whole egg solids, autolyzed yeast extract, salt, onion, mustard flour, soy lethicin, citric acid, white pepper, paprika, tumeric, lemon juice solids, and natural flavors.

Knorr. Open the packet and you will find that the powder is not even yellow, but peach. Upon cooking it turns a bright orange. The powder smells like artificially flavored bullion, not of egg or lemon. No wonder, for there is no egg or lemon in the mix, which comprises mostly starch, flours, and dried milk. The sauce is prepared by blending the powder with half a stick of melted butter, then adding a cup of more milk, and then stirring it while raising the temperature first to a boil, then lowering to a simmer, till thickened.

Knorr hollandaise was much more strongly flavored than McCormick, tasting richer and fattier. But the taste was of milk, not of egg or lemon. Despite the mix's lack of egg, it better approximates the color and viscosity of a yolk-rich sauce made from scratch. It even coagulates less lumpily when cooling than McCormick. But the lack of egg sacrifices taste for texture, and the package's suggestion that "if desired," you may "stir in 1 tsp lemon juice before serving," is ludicrous. Lemon is vital to hollandaise. So agrees the package, which claims that Knorr hollandaise is "rich with the flavors of butter and lemon" though it will only be as rich in either as the amount you add yourself.

Knorr ingredients: Modified food starch, wheat flour, nonfat dry milk, hydrolized wheat protein, partially hydrogenated peanut oil, maltodextrin, lactose, salt, fructose, onion and garlic powder, citric acid, yeast extract, beta carotene (color), vegetable gum, natural flavor, paprika, spice, dextrose.