Making Hollandaise with Whole Butter | Rouxbe Online Culinary School (2024)

FAQs

Can you add too much butter to hollandaise sauce? ›

Why Does Hollandaise Sauce Break? Over-heating or overcooking the egg yolks is one culprit. Next time, be sure to use a double boiler and heat the yolks gently to avoid overcooking them. The second cause is either adding too much butter or adding it too quickly.

In a small bowl, whisk together egg yolks, lemon juice, cold water, salt and pepper. Melt butter in a saucepan over low heat. Gradually whisk yolk mixture into butter. Continue whisking over low heat for 8 minutes, or until sauce is thickened.

One way to boost your chances of a successful sauce is to use clarified butter. Clarified butter—butter that is liquefied and then strained until it's clear—helps stabilize the sauce so that it doesn't curdle. It is pure fat, whereas whole butter is 16 to 17 percent water, which can weaken the emulsion.

Hollandaise Sauce

One common hollandaise mistake is overcooking the egg yolks, and there's no coming back from that. But the most common problem is that the emulsion breaks, and you see streaks of liquid butter instead of a uniformly creamy sauce.

Because of its water content, more whole butter is needed to thicken a hollandaise then just straight clarified butter. Make sure your acid reduction is cool before the egg yolks are added or they may curdle.

When making hollandaise, some chefs prefer to use clarified butter which is straight butter fat. In order to take advantage of the flavors in butter's milk solids and whey, some chefs prefer to use whole butter.

You keep whisking the mixture as you add the melted butter because you want to break it up into tiny, tiny drops. Each tiny drop ends up surrounded by emulsifiers . But to give the emulsifiers a helping hand, you need to keep the butter from gathering in a big glob.

Make sure the butter is between 130-140 degrees Fahrenheit (55-60 degrees Celsius). While constantly whisking, add the butter to the sabayon in a steady stream. Add enough butter until you achieve a somewhat thick consistency.

If your hollandaise sauce tastes mostly like butter, you may have added too much butter to the recipe. Try adding a little more Dijon mustard and lemon juice to balance out the flavors. Is the Hollandaise sauce like mayo? No, hollandaise sauce is not like mayonnaise.

While there's risk in eating undercooked meat (rare burgers) and raw egg dishes (Caesar dressing), hollandaise is particularly vulnerable to foodborne illness because the egg yolks aren't fully cooked, and the sauce isn't served hot (eggs should be heated to at least 135 degrees).

What to avoid in cooking hollandaise sauce? ›

Hollandaise should be held between 120F to 145F (49 to 63C) so it does not split or curdle. If the sauce is heated above 150F, the eggs can overcook, become grainy and the sauce can potentially split.

Traditional hollandaise, made by emulsifying melted clarified butter into egg yolks and lemon juice, is notoriously difficult to make. You not only have to take the same care in its construction as you take for oil-in-egg-yolk mayonnaise, but you also have to deal with the fickle nature of hot eggs and butter.

Many recipes call for different ratios of egg yolk to butter. Egg yolk size can vary substantially. Your recipe is definitely at the low egg/high butter end of the spectrum. Considering it came out looking great, add another egg yolk next time, and another the time after that.

The white sauce is fatty or butter splits from sauce

Cause: Too much fat added or roux was heated too much. Solution: Take the pot off the stove and use a few layers of paper towel to pat sauce to absorb the fat. If that doesn't work, start again.

But one unexpected error bakers can make is adding too much of a good thing, butter. Although butter generally makes it all better, bakers who go overboard with it are dooming their cookies to a greasy and crumbly texture.