Escoffier’s Hollandaise Sauce Image Used Under Creative Commons License From ruhlman.com
My Citizens, we are almost done with our week of world sauces, so it’s time to visit France for one of the world’s foremost ‘mother sauces’ – hollandaise! A good Hollandaise is a thing of emulsified gastronomic wonder, but can be challenging to make. As it happens, the version of Hollandaise used by the legendary French Chef Escoffier is rarely used today, but is FAR superior to the version you’ve tried before – trust your all-knowing TFD on this one!
Hollandaise sauce, formerly also called Dutch sauce, is an emulsion of egg yolk, melted butter, water and lemon juice (or a white wine or vinegar reduction). It is usually seasoned with salt, and white pepper or cayenne pepper.
Hollandaise is one of the five mother sauces in French cuisine. It is well known as a key ingredient of eggs Benedict, and is often served on vegetables such as steamed asparagus.
Sauce Hollandaise is French for ‘Dutch sauce’. The name implies Dutch origins, but the actual connection is unclear. The name ‘Dutch sauce’ is documented in English as early as 1573, though without a recipe showing that it was the same thing. The first documented recipe is from 1651 in La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François for ‘asparagus with fragrant sauce’: “make a sauce with some good fresh butter, a little vinegar, salt, and nutmeg, and an egg yolk to bind the sauce; take care that it doesn’t curdle.”
Not much later, in 1667, a similar Dutch recipe was published. Thus the popular theory that the name comes from a recipe that the Huguenots brought back from their exile in Holland is chronologically untenable.
La Varenne is credited with bringing sauces out of the Middle Ages with his publication and may well have invented hollandaise sauce. A more recent name for it is sauce Isigny, named after Isigny-sur-Mer, which is famous for its butter. Isigny sauce is found in recipe books starting in the 19th century.
By the 19th century, sauces had been classified into four categories by Carême. One of his categories was allemande, which was a stock-based sauce using egg and lemon juice. Escoffier replaced allemande with Hollandaise in his list of the five mother sauces of haute cuisine. While many believe that a true Hollandaise sauce should only contain the basic ingredients of eggs, butter and lemon, Prosper Montagne suggested using either a white wine or vinegar reduction, similar to a Béarnaise sauce, to help improve the taste.
In English, the name ‘Dutch sauce’ was common through the nineteenth century, but was largely displaced by Hollandaise in the twentieth.
Citizens, I could never hope to improve upon the instructions, pictures and recipe offered by author extraordinaire Michael Ruhlman – you can see his instructions and pictures here.
I will post his recipe steps here for convenience, but by all means – do check out his fantastic website!
Battle on – The Generalissimo
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon minced shallot
- 10 or so peppercorns, cracked
- a crumbled bay leaf (parsley, thyme if you have some)
- a three-finger pinch of salt
- ¼ cup good vinegar
- 3 egg yolks
- lemon juice to taste (1 to 3 teaspoons)
- 8 ounces (two sticks) butter melted in a vessel you can pour a thin stream from
- cayenne to taste (optional)
Instructions
- First make the reduction, which is the step that gives the Hollandaise its unique flavor (otherwise it’s just lemon butter, which is good, but not traditional Hollandaise). Combine the shallot, cracked pepper, bay leaf, salt, and vinegar in a pan and simmer it till it’s dry (you’ll sometimes see this referred to as sec, the French term).
- All the strong acidity is gone, leaving only the flavors, and a little caramelization in the pan. Now you need to capture those flavors by adding the amazing ingredient we call water to the pan, about ¼ cup. Bring it to a simmer, and strain it into a saucepan. Taste this, so you know what you’re talking about. Add the egg yolks to the reduction.
- Next step is to cook the yolks. This gives them volume and changes their flavor (it should kill any bad bacteria, too, if you’re using industrial eggs; I highly recommend organic if they’re available). Eggs are best cooked over simmering water, but any heat will do—just keep it low. You don’t want scrambled eggs. I hold a pan in a pot filled with simmering water; this allows me to control the heat easily. Add a good squeeze of lemon juice here.
- The eggs are done when you can see that if you cooked them more, they’d be hard, not creamy. Don’t overthink it and don’t worry about undercooking the eggs. (You can overcook them, though.)
- Traditional Hollandaise uses clarified butter. I simply melt my butter in the microwave, spoon off the froth at the top, and pour all the clear butter fat directly into the cooked yolks off the heat. You don’t need to cook this sauce any more.
- As with a mayonnaise, you need to first add just a few drops of the melted butter, whisking it in quickly to establish your emulsification. Once it’s going you can pour the butter in a steady stream, whisking continuously, till all the butter’s in. Don’t worry if some of the watery whey goes in as well; it can only help (I discard what’s left when all the butter’s in).
- If the sauce has become rough on the surface, this is right before it’s going to break. When I see this, I dribble in some cool water. The sauce immediately smooths out. Again, if it breaks, put a teaspoon of water in a clean bowl and start whisking again. I’ve never lost a best of three with an emulsified sauce.
- When the butter is in, taste it, add some more lemon (it should be distinctly lemony), and I add a pinch of cayenne.
- If you have leftover Hollandaise, you can refrigerate it and reuse it. To reuse, melt it in a microwave, then simply re-emulsify it into a little bit of water, just the way you would fix a broken sauce.
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