Perfect hollandaise sauce: A great sauce not only for meat, but also for salads and more

Hollandaise sauce recipe

Hollandaise sauce consists of a few ingredients, but its taste is absolutely divine.

Recipe instructions

1. Start by preparing the egg yolks in a bowl and cutting the butter into several thin slices.
2. Then prepare a water bath and make sure that the water under the bowl is boiling. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks until they get foamy and become thick.
3. Then start adding butter to them gradually and mix each slice carefully.
4. Once you've mixed in the last slice of butter and the sauce has a smooth consistency, remove the bowl from the water bath and season the sauce with salt, pepper and lemon juice.
5. Serve immediately and do not let the sauce cool. Enjoy!

Tips and tricks for the right taste and consistency of hollandaise sauce

The preparation of hollandaise sauce is comparable to the preparation of home-made mayonnaise. Once you learn it and understand what you have to pay attention to when preparing it, you will have won.

• You can use simple math to make hollandaise sauce. More yolks = a thicker sauce. If the sauce is too runny, add more butter. If the sauce seems too thick, lemon juice or water will help.
• In some recipes, you will come across the use of clarified butter (ghee). This will create a shiny hollandaise sauce, but you certainly won't spoil anything with classic butter, because the taste of both sauces is the same.
• Once you have mastered the preparation of traditional hollandaise sauce, you can play with its taste. Before serving, you can mix e.g. tarragon, finely chopped shallots or juice from red oranges into the hollandaise sauce. There are countless variations of hollandaise sauce.
• When preparing the hollandaise sauce, you can make the job easier with the help of an immersion blender and skip the water bath altogether. However, in this case, the butter must be melted so that it better combines with the yolks.

Mistakes to avoid when making hollandaise sauce

There are a lot of things that can go wrong when making hollandaise sauce. How can I avoid mistakes?

• Watch the temperature carefully. When preparing the sauce, the water under the bowl must not be too hot and boil, because the yolks will curdle, but it must not be too cold either, because the sauce will not heat up and thicken.
• Stir the butter into the sauce gradually and in small pieces. The method of cutting the butter into cubes/slices is reliable and practical, because the butter and egg yolks combine better.
• Serve the hollandaise sauce immediately after preparing. Although you can keep it warm over low heat, and it would even last in the fridge, it tastes best fresh.