Home › Meat and Fish Sauces › Hollandaise Sauce
Hollandaise Sauce
Cream half a cup of butter and add the yolks of two eggs one at a time, beating it thoroughly, then one-third of a cup of boiling water. Cook over a double boiler till it thickens to the consistency of a custard. The seasoning, which consists of one-fourth of a teaspoon of salt, a dash of cayenne and one tablespoon of lemon juice, is added just before the boiler is lifted from the fire. - Katherine A. French.
A creamed-butter hollandaise rather than a whisked-in-melted-butter one, which makes it more forgiving than the classic French method. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- Keep the water below a simmerThe bowl or top pan must never touch the water, and the water should barely shiver. Yolks begin to set at around 150-160F; much past that the sauce curdles into scrambled egg.
- Butter quantity and temperatureHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. It must be genuinely soft, at about 65F, or it will not cream and the yolks will sit in lumps rather than emulsify.
- Add the yolks one at a timeThe instruction is not decorative. Each yolk needs to be fully absorbed into the butter before the next goes in, or the emulsion breaks before it ever reaches the heat.
- Boiling water, not warmThe third of a cup of boiling water both thins the mixture and starts the yolks setting. Dribble it in while beating hard rather than pouring it in one go.
- Season off the heatSeason at the very end -- Lemon juice added early can thin the sauce prematurely and its fresh flavour dulls with cooking. Whisk in the salt, cayenne and lemon just before lifting the pan from the heat, as written.
- Rescuing a split sauceIf it separates, take it off the heat at once and whisk in a tablespoon of cold water, or start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it a spoonful at a time.
- Yield and holdingMakes roughly a cup, enough for four servings over asparagus, poached eggs or poached fish. It will not reheat; hold it lukewarm in the covered pan over the switched-off water for up to half an hour.
Hollandaise gets its name from a supposed Dutch origin, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the sauce as we know it was codified in French kitchens during the nineteenth century; earlier English books sometimes call much the same thing "Dutch sauce." The creaming method here, starting with soft butter rather than clarified melted butter whisked into warm yolks, is the domestic-science variant: slower, but far harder to break in a home kitchen.