Serrano ham, caramelized onions,fried quail egg and hollandaise sauce

Difficulty 3/5

These bites are AMAZING, they have a great flavour mix that explodes quite nicely in our mouth. You can have almost everything ready ahead of time and just fry the eggs before serving and have your guests amaze at your cooking skills. I made this for a group of friends and they talked about it all the while that it was in front of them. Give it a try! The most difficult part I would say is the hollandaise sauce because of its risk of splitting / turning into scrambled eggs, but once you get that hang of it, you’ll want to put it on EVERYTHING.
Portions: 20

Ingredients:
– 1 baguette, cut in slices and toasted or crackers of your choice
– 150g serrano ham
– 200g green onion
– 20g butter
– 10g sugar
– 20 quail eggs

For the hollandaise:
– 10 egg yolks
– 10ml water
– 200g melted butter, cooled to room temperature
– salt and pepper to taste

Procedure:
1. First we’ll make the caramelized onions. I made these the night before of my event and the next day I just took them out of the fridge to let them get to room temperature. Slice the onion as fine as you can and cook it on med-low heat with the butter.

2. We use med-low heat because we want it to be throughly cooked before it starts to get caramelized, and we also want this colour to be even. You will notice that it will get translucent, very very soft and eventually will start to get some colour.

3. Here’s a tip. The juice from the onions, which is packed with sugar, will start to stick to the pan and caramelize. To release that and take it back to the onions, add a bit of water and scrape it off using the onions. Here it goes the before and after:

4. In the end they will look like the photo below. I finish them off with a tiny bit of sugar while they are hot just to enhance more the flavour, but it’s entirely optional

5. Next, for the hollandaise sauce, take the egg yolks and the 10ml of water in a metal bowl and put it on a simmering bain marie. Whisk continuously until it starts to foam up and you can make figures with it when it drizzles. This could take a couple of minutes. If you feel the bowl get too hot, take it out of the heat and whisk for a while; it should not get hotter than 60C, which is the temperature of your tap water when you have only the hot water on, feel it with your finger.

6. Add the melted butter off the heat little by little while whisking. The fat from the butter will make it thicken up nicely. Finish with salt and pepper.

7. Keep this on the same pot where you did the bain marie but without any heat below, just to keep it nice and warm. If it cools down it could get a bit thicker, you can bring it back with a drizzle of boiling water and whisking vigorously.
8. For the fried quail egg, just add a bit of oil on the pan, enough to cover thinly the surface of your pan and fry them on really low heat. If the heat is too high, the egg with will bubble up horribly. The idea is that the egg white is nice and white and the egg yolk will pop in your mouth on the bite.

8. Then, I put them on kitchen paper to absorb the excess oil, and because I’m really OCD about cooking, I used a small cutter and made a perfect circle out of these to fit the size of the crackers I used.

9. Finally, set them up. I put a teaspoon of caramelized onions, then a piece of serrano ham, and the fried egg on top. I serve the hollandaise in a small jug so people could serve it on top and then eat it immediately 🙂