This Benedict Is My Ode To the Outdoor Boys

Luke from the Outdoor Boys is the undisputed greatest YouTuber of all time. Don't argue with me about this. Luke here at the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel. If you don't know Luke, he's a benevolent madman. And what I love about him is not only does he happily put himself in what I would consider uninhabitable situations, while doing so, he highly values delicious food. Chicken over a fire is hard to beat. Slow roasting a lamb shank in a shack that he built himself. Or eating Alaskan king crab by a fire with garlic butter. Oh, that was so warm and delicious. And one of the iconic things he makes on his trips is fresh bread, which he usually drenches in honey butter. It's not only brilliant how he does it, it's actually incredibly delicious. And since he's retired, in hopes that it might inspire him to start making videos again, I'm going to show you how to make Outdoor Boys breakfast indoors. Complete with fried bread, English muffins, and honey butter hollandaise. So if you want to pretend to be a real man while staying indoors, this is the Outdoor Boys better day. Now, each trip Luke goes on, he brings a Ziploc bag filled with flour, yeast, and salt. Not sure if he measures it in advance or what we're going to, but it's really smart for the type of work that he does. You better believe if I went camping, I want to eat well. Who would think you would make fresh bread easily by the fire? So I'm starting with 190 grams of all-purpose flour, three grams of salt, and then we're going to do two and a half grams of rapid instant yeast. Not sure if he adds sugar, I'm going to add about three grams of sugar. And then he'll prep this at home, pack it up, and then when he's ready to bake, all he's got to do is add water. We've got 114 grams to it now, so we're just going to add it. I'm going to hit it with a little bit of olive oil, two, three grams. And you can just knead it in the bag, and you really just want to kind of work it, squeeze it until it becomes a literal dough. I would make this like regular dough in a bowl, but we're trying to live like Luke today. Now all that flour is hydrated, and it's definitely a dough. Now Luke would prep this at night, and he's usually in like negative 30 degrees or whatever it is in Alaska. So what he does before he goes to sleep, he just sticks it on his body, gets in his sleeping bag, and it'll ferment against his body all night. You can do the same. If it's early in the morning and you want to make breakfast, you get up and you do this early, hop back into bed, take a nap. Your body's a nice place for this to happen, so we're just going to chill and come back when it's ready to use. Now I got tied up yesterday, so just sort of hung out with the dough till the morning, and here we are. You know, definitely slept with it against my body all night. You sure about that? So now we've got our dough. It's risen. Let's get it out the bag. A little bit of flour so you can work with it. You could just split it into four, or you could be more precise. We're looking for 80 gram balls. Then what we're going to do is we're going to work them into a nice little ball. Then we're going to place that onto a piece of parchment, and we just want to squash it down. This is when Outdoor Boy would just stretch it and then throw it onto a griddle. We've got the time. We're nice and warm inside, and we're going to do it English muffin style. One thing I got to do is for English muffin style, some cornmeal. So this just taught me that, like, you know, dough is dough. Some people add milk to it. Some people add sugar or honey. At the end of the day, bread's basically bread, and if you've got a dough, say you've got a pizza dough or a lavash like we made for our kebabs, you can do more with it than the intended purpose of that recipe. Shape it a little bit different, and you get a different product. Now we've got our English muffins ready. I'm just going to wrap them. Then we're just going to leave these out and allow them to proof a bit. Next up for Eggs Benedict, we need some poached eggs. And I'm American. I don't use Canadian bacon in my Eggs Benedict. I use some nice, smoky, sweet American bacon. What even is Canadian bacon, you know? I have been opening up the bacon package by just cutting it in half. It just makes it easier in every way, dealing with smaller pieces. Now for the eggs, I've got a strainer with a bowl underneath. And if you've ever made poached eggs, you know there's all these strands of egg white that go flying. Cracking the egg into a strainer simply allows all of those little stringy bits to slip through the mesh while maintaining all of that strong egg white that's going to coat the egg once it hits the water. Be careful you don't crack the yolk. They look combined, but they are separated. And once we add them to the water, they're going to be perfect. Now all we can do now is we can just get the bacon cooked and crisp and get our eggs pre-poached. So we're going to poach them until they firm up and are solid, but are still a little, like, too under to serve at that point. Then when we're ready to serve everything, we're going to just drop them back in the water, warm them up, get them to be perfect, and then we're ready to just serve everything hot. And now Luke would cook all this on a handmade griddle, a griddle he welded himself like a real man. You know, I bought mine. Now I actually find the act of making breads and doughs highly therapeutic. Usually when I have problems, I sit in front of this board and knead dough. It works, but it doesn't solve the problem. And that's where our sponsor BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp makes starting therapy easier and much less intimidating for a lot of people, including myself. Now I haven't had the greatest experiences with in-person therapy. To be honest, I don't really like leaving my home, especially when it's 20 degrees outside. You're always sitting in a waiting room and your appointment is always late. I value my time, and I don't like when it's wasted. BetterHelp can match you to one of over 30,000 therapists in their network based on your needs, preferences, and location, which gives you access to a wider range of expertise that may not be available in your city. You just fill out a questionnaire that asks you questions about the challenges you're going through, what kind of therapists you like, and in most cases, BetterHelp will match you with the therapists within 48 hours. And you can schedule therapy sessions at a time that's convenient for you. And if you don't love your therapist, you can request a new therapist at any time at no additional charge. And if you head on down to betterhelp.com backslash not another cooking show, BetterHelp is going to give you guys 10% off your first month. So go check out BetterHelp, and let's get back into the recipe. So on a cold griddle, we're going to turn the heat on to medium high and then add our bacon strips onto the griddle. I like to place a weight onto them so they don't curl up on me, and we can get a nice even cook on these. And we're just going to cook these for a few minutes on that first side and allow the fat to begin to render. Then we're going to flip them, place the weights back on, and we're just going to make sure that the fat renders slowly and evenly and the bacon crisps up beautifully. Besides our griddle, we have our pot of water simmering, not boiling. To that, we're going to add some salt and a cup of white vinegar to help the eggs bind. Then we can gently drop our eggs into the water after creating a vortex in the water with a spoon. We're going to let those eggs simmer just until you can see the whites firm up, but the yolks are still jiggly. If you pull it out of the water and the white is still jiggly, it needs more time, but that's just how I like my poached eggs. Some people like them barely cooked. Then spoon out the eggs and gently place them on a towel to dry, and those are ready to be reheated and served. By now, the bacon should be nicely crisp. We can remove them, let them dry on a towel, and clean the griddle with a little bit of water to steam up off any of the stuck-on bits. Dry it really well, and then it's ready to cook the English muffins. And here we have our perfect pre-poached eggs. I can feel firmness in the white and jiggliness in the yolk, right? Now all I have to do is just drop these in to bring them back up to temp and then re-dampen them in the cloth and then serve them on top. And we've got our bacon. Now we can make our English muffins. The nice thing about the parchment is we can just take them and transfer them pretty easily. And we're just going to get our flat top back up to, you know, like 350, 300. Now back on our clean griddle, I'm going to melt a small knob of butter. And then I'm going to flip those dough balls right onto the griddle. And to help them with lift and to cook through fast, I'm going to spray some water onto the griddle and place a lid on both of the dough to steam them through. And we're going to cook them like that for about two to three minutes, or more importantly, until I can peek under them and see that we've got a really strong golden brown on that first side. We're going to flip the English muffins and repeat that process on the other side. Once we got a nice brown there, then I just like to kind of roll it to kiss the sides of the English muffin onto the heat. And then we're going to take them off the griddle and allow them to rest. See how amazing that turned out? Who knew? We're going to let these cool and then we can treat them like English muffins. Now, in honor of Luke, we're making a hollandaise, but not just any hollandaise. A honey butter or maple butter hollandaise. Luke's favorite thing ever. I will add the addition of the maple syrup. I'm going to replace honey with maple in the hollandaise. And just because he might like this, we're going to run the hollandaise through a siphon, which is going to give it this airy lightness. It's going to be like ethereal. First step to this is we're going to need to warm up the blender. So I'm going to take some of the water that we poached the eggs in, which is still hot, and just warm the inside. Since we're making this in a blender, we need heat to cook the egg. So we're going to do that by warming all the ingredients using room temp eggs. And then hot butter. Pour it out. And I'm going to reserve a tablespoon of the water. I'm going to pour that into the blender. I'm going to do two egg yolks. One, two. Tablespoon of lemon juice. Two to three tablespoons of maple syrup. Salt. A little dash of cayenne, just for balance. Then our butter. I'm going to take about a stick and a couple tablespoons. Maybe three tablespoons. One stick and one tablespoon. I'm going to add that to a pan. I'm going to get that on the stove, and I'm going to get that hot, but I want to make sure I never let it boil. So first off with what's in there, we're just going to hit it lightly. And then while this is still hot, we're going to start to slowly stream it in. It's on this slow blend function. I may not use all of it, but I'm just going to let the texture speak for me. Probably going to want it a little thinner, since it's running through the siphon, than I might normally. You're not going to use the siphon. You might need to add more butter to thicken it. It's a little thin, so I'm going to add just a little bit more warm butter. It's delicious. We just need to adjust the consistency. It's just easier than whiskey. See how it coats? So it's now thickened. Now again, you're probably going to want to add more butter to thicken this further, so it clings to the egg, if you're not using one of these. But that's what we're going to be using today. We're going to pour that in here. Oh, actually, we got to run it through a strainer. Make sure there's no egg. Make sure there's nothing that's going to clog the siphon. And then into the siphon it goes. On with the top. Got a CO2 cartridge. We got to charge it. So we're going to run it in here. You hear that? That's charge. And then we got to shake it. And then let's test. That's going to work. For the English muffins, right, what you do is you take a fork, and we're going to go around right in the middle, and poke kind of as far as you can. Straight line. Nice and even. This is going to allow us to get that craggly inside. You never cut an English muffin with a knife. And then I like to go again one more time. Makes it a little bit easier to breach the side. I mean, forget about that. Isn't that cool? Now I'm just going to pop these in the toaster, just like normal English muffins. Now our plate. Something Luke might appreciate. While the muffins are toasting, we can reheat the eggs. Just going to gently pick them up off the towel, and then drop them back into the water. Just going to let them sit in there for about 30 seconds, and they should warm back up again without overcooking. And pull them out of the water, and dry them again on a towel. Now our eggs are hot. Got some chopped chives for garnish. Of course, we need to butter our toasted muffins. Then on top of that, a three to four half strips of the bacon, piled high to cradle the egg. Then gently place the egg on top of the bacon, and then hit it with a siphon of the hollandaise, roughly the same size as the egg. On top of that, we're going to finish with some chives, and a hit of cayenne. Perfect eggs benedict to pay tribute to a perfect creator who inspired them. It's about as good as you get with an eggs benedict. Notice how the egg white has some body to it. It's not all liquid. That's how I like my poached egg. And so that's how I pay tribute to somebody I deeply admire. He's one of those YouTubers who actually cares about his viewers, cares about the things he's making. Is making a wholesome thing for a mass audience. That's always been something that I've tried to build here. So much love to Luke. I urge you to start watching him. I would fall asleep to him every night as soon as I found this channel. He's huge, but some people who follow me might not know who he is. And if you see this Luke, I would love to see you make this. Recipe is going to be down in the description. Head on down to the link. Check out my Patreon. We run a cooking school over there that's very interactive. That's all that I have today. I'll see you next time. Until then, take care of yourself and go feed yourself.