Three One-Egg Breakfasts — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:01] Hello, this is Chef John from foodwisher.com with my three favorite one-egg breakfast. That's right, I'm going to show you a super fast egg benedict featuring a one-minute eggless

[00:14] hollandaise sauce. I'll also share a one-egg shakshuka that's off the hookah, plus we're going to poach an egg in a sausage gravy and serve it over a homemade biscuit that only needs two ingredients and about 15 minutes to make.

[00:28] I know that is a lot, so let's go ahead and get started by frying up a piece of Canadian bacon and a little bit of butter over medium-high heat. And we're not just heating ham here. We're also browning that butter a little bit, which is going to help us flavor our egg and eventually our sauce.

[00:44] And once we have that placed on our toasted English muffin, we will quickly add a large egg to our pan. And we'll pour in two tablespoons of water and we'll cover it tightly. And we will have what I like to call flat poached eggs.

[00:56] also known as a steamed egg which is virtually identical to a poached egg except much faster and of course flatter. And then because I fancy after one minute I take off the cover

[01:08] and I reduce the heat to low and I go around with the edge of the spatula trimming the egg into a perfect circle so that it looks nice on our English muffin. And no, we're not discarding that white. We're going to gather it together

[01:20] and place it underneath where it won't be seen but it will definitely be eaten. And yes, in case you're wondering, you can cook your Canadian bacon in the pan with the egg at this point, but I designed separately so I could focus on this fabulous technique,

[01:34] which, by the way, cooks the egg in like a minute to a minute and a half. So make sure you're poking and checking for doneness, since I definitely want to keep the egg dough kind of runny. And once that's done to our liking, we'll place it on top of our Canadian bacon,

[01:47] and we'll rush back to the stove to make our eggless hollandaise sauce, which only takes about a minute and starts with a splash of water plus some fresh lemon juice and I'm doing half a lemon because I like it lemony

[01:59] but you can put less if you want and what we'll do is put our heat on high and we'll add some cayenne pepper plus a nice big pinch of salt and as soon as that liquid starts to simmer and deglaze the bottom we'll give the pan a swirl

[02:11] and we'll turn off the heat and we'll throw in a couple tablespoons of butter which we'll cut up into some smaller pieces and we will start swirling and shaking the pan until the butter disappears, at which point if everything goes according to plan,

[02:25] you should have a perfectly emulsified, eggless hollandaise sauce. And we'll quickly spoon that over our still hot egg, which we could tamp with foil to keep it even warmer. But the sauce is so fast, I don't even bother.

[02:37] And that's it, I finished up with a shake of cayenne and some freshly sniffed chives. And I'm going to grab a forky knife and dig in. And what we have here is a much faster lighter version of eggs Benedict and even though that sauce is thinner and does not have an egg yolk in it it has the exact same flavor profile as hollandaise And since we eating it with an egg yolk

[02:58] one could argue it might even be a smarter choice. And again, I think you'd have to go with a runny yolk for this, since of course that creates basically a second sauce. And while that yolk is swelling, our lemon butter sauce is soaked into our English muffins.

[03:12] And as I already mentioned, this is going to taste exactly like traditional Eggs Benedict. Oh, and if you're wondering about the top half of the muffin, when I'm done I toast that separately, and I butter it and eat it with jam for dessert.

[03:25] But anyway, that's how you turn one egg into a special occasion breakfast in a very short amount of time with little effort. And favorite one-egg breakfast number one is done. And we'll move on to a one-egg shakshuka,

[03:38] which besides a few green onions, is going to involve some homegrown Roma tomatoes. And these are called midnight Roma, since they start out black and then eventually turn red when they're ripe. I'm also using some homegrown mild green peppers and red Jimmy Nardello.

[03:53] And after a couple minutes of knife work, we'll add our sliced green onions to small oil in a pan set over medium-high heat. And we will also toss in our salt, as well as some cumin, some smoked paprika, some turmeric,

[04:08] a little bit of dry oregano, some freshly ground black pepper, and last but never least a few shakes of cayenne and we'll take a freakishly small wooden spoon and we'll cook this during for about a minute

[04:20] to soften up the onions a bit plus we're going to wake up our slices and infuse that olive oil with their goodness and once that's been accomplished we'll add our sliced peppers and our tomatoes

[04:32] which I've cut in about half inch pieces and we'll stir all that together and relatively quickly those tomatoes are going to release their juices and our sauce will start to form and that's pretty much all there is to it

[04:44] except you're going to have to decide how long to let your sauce cook. Okay, the tomatoes are going to collapse pretty quickly but the peppers will take some time to soften up and if you want those to retain a firm texture

[04:56] cook it less and if you want them nice and soft, cook it more but the point is you're going to have to decide. I mean you have been, are, and always will be the boss of your sauce but right here mine was looking just about perfect

[05:08] and once it is we'll use our spoon to make a little well in the center and we will carefully transfer our egg in oh and don't worry that little black speck is black pepper I hope and as you can see I was trying to center that yolk in the white

[05:22] but we don't want to break it so I came to my senses and stopped doing that and instead started spreading the white out around the yolk just so it maybe cooks a little bit faster and a little more evenly and then all we need to do is cover this

[05:36] and let that cook until our egg is done as we want And something to keep in mind when you pull this off the stove the egg is going to continue to cook in that very hot sauce So if you like your yolk a little bit runny which I do you going to want to pull it off a little bit early And since I have to

[05:52] move cameras and lights and set up the final shots and contractually obligated pictures, I pulled mine off even earlier than I normally would. And that's it, I grabbed some toast, since some kind of bread to dip is a requirement, and then we'll garnish with some crumbled feta,

[06:07] plus the scattering of chopped cilantro or parsley and then we'll grab a spoon and dig in. After that is, I take a piece of toast and use the pointy end to stir the yolk which I was hoping was still a little bit runny

[06:20] and happily it was. Okay, it was actually halfway between runny and jammy which works for me. Alright, I'm not going to shame them in public but I know people who like this with the eggs cooked all the way through

[06:32] which I just don't understand. But anyway, what we have here is a world-class one-egg breakfast, especially for anyone who has a summer garden. And if you grow fresh tomatoes and peppers, and you're not making this at least once a week,

[06:46] you, my friend, are doing somewhere wrong. And if you don't garden, at least get to the farmer's market and try this with different peppers and different tomatoes, since this is right at the top of the list of ways to enjoy them.

[06:58] But anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed favorite one-egg breakfast number two, Which brings us to number three Which is an egg potion and sausage gravy Served on a homemade biscuit Which believe it or not

[07:10] Starts with us making one single biscuit Which sounds crazy Unless you know the two ingredient biscuit hack Which is self rising flour mixed with cream And what we do is stir that together

[07:22] Until a ball of dough forms like this At which point we can just quickly shape it with our hand But for something slightly nicer looking we can use some plastic wrap to shape it into a patty. And once we get something pretty round and about a half inch thick,

[07:37] and we fine tune those sides as much as we want, we will transfer that onto a parchment lined baking sheet, and we'll pop that into a 450 degree oven for about 12 to 15 minutes, depending on how thick it is, or until it looks like this.

[07:52] And if we flip this over, it should be beautifully golden brown. And this is actually the side I want facing up when we serve our sausage gravy and eggs, which, by the way, is so fast and easy, we're going to make that while the biscuits bake in.

[08:06] And to do that, we will add two breakfast sausages to a little bit of butter in a pan that we have set on medium-high heat, and we'll go ahead and brown that up while we break it into small pieces. And yes, of course we've removed the casing from the sausage.

[08:18] Otherwise, how are you going to do this? And once we have that chopped up into nice small pieces and it's browning nicely, we will toss in some sliced green onions and we'll cook that straight for just about a minute and once that happened we transfer in a little bit of flour and we stir that into former roux R and we cook that for just one minute to take out the raw edge at which point we can whisk in our cold milk

[08:43] And as you know, hot roux plus cold milk equals no lumps. So if you enjoy a lumpy gravy, this recipe's not for you. and as soon as we whisk that in we'll wait for this to start to simmer and we'll toss in a pinch of freshly ground

[08:56] black pepper, cayenne and salt and we'll give it one more quick whisk and once that does start to simmer we'll give it a stir with a spoon and in just about 30 seconds this is going to thicken beautifully and you're going to be the proud owner

[09:09] of what we call at the truck stop a sausage gravy also sometimes known as country gravy and that's it, just like the shakshika we'll go ahead and transfer in our egg which I'm not going to fuss with this time

[09:22] because we're not going to present this in the pan and we'll cover that and let it cook to our desired doneness and we'll go ahead and serve up on our biscuit which of course is piping hot since as I mentioned you're going to make the gravy and egg

[09:35] while that's baking in the oven and after we spoon over a generous amount of sauce from around the egg we'll grab a spatula and place the egg right on top and then we'll finish up by spooning over the rest of the sauce which I'm going to do around the outside

[09:48] around the outside, around the outside so I don't completely cover that beautiful egg and even though the egg might have been slightly undercooked when we started this plating by the time all that hot gravy is spooned around

[10:00] it's going to be perfectly set as you'll see when I slice in and that's it, we'll finish up with some freshly sliced green onions and we'll check to see how we did with the yolk which I'm going to say is not bad and we again hit that sweet spot

[10:13] between runny and jammy and I would be more than happy with just a freshly baked biscuit topped with this creamy, super savory sausage gravy. But when you combine it with the egg, you're looking at a classic case

[10:25] of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. But anyway, that's it. The last of my three favorite one-egg breakfasts. Although I probably should have called them my three favorite one-egg meals.

[10:37] All right, I don't want to sound like a life coach here, but when you've had one of those days where just nothing went right, on those occasions, the best way to turn things around is to have breakfast for dinner and all three of these recipes would be perfect for that.

[10:51] But whether you enjoy these in the evening or for lunch or for an actual breakfast, they're all fast, easy, and delicious and I really do hope you give them a try soon. So please follow the links below for the ingredient amount,

[11:05] the printable written recipe, and my free info as usual. And that is all we enjoy.

[11:17] you