The Art of Making Hollandaise Sauce: A Step-by-Step Guide

When it comes to making hollandaise sauce, there's an art to it that requires patience and attention to detail. The goal is to create a rich and creamy emulsion that coats the back of a spoon, indicating that it's reached the perfect consistency. To start, one needs to have a hot pan with some fat in it - whether it's butter or oil. In this case, we're using butter, as it provides a better flavor profile for our sauce.

As we add the butter to the pan, we need to do it drop by drop, allowing each piece to mix with the egg yolks before adding the next. This is crucial in creating an emulsion that will hold together. If we were to add all the butter at once, it would separate and not emulsify properly. By doing it gradually, we can create a smooth and creamy sauce.

The key to making hollandaise sauce is to cook the egg yolks slowly over low heat, stirring constantly. This allows them to thicken and emulsify with the fat. As we add each drop of butter, we need to stir vigorously to incorporate it into the mixture. The spoon should be moving in a circular motion, allowing the butter to mix with the egg yolks evenly.

As we continue cooking, the sauce will start to froth and become thicker. This is a sign that it's working its way towards the perfect consistency. We need to keep stirring constantly, making sure that there are no lumps or streaks of fat in the sauce. If we see any lumps forming, we need to pull the pan off the heat immediately and add an ice cube to lower the temperature.

Once our sauce is at the right consistency, we can start seasoning it with salt. This will enhance the flavor and bring out the richness of the butter and eggs. We also want to make sure that our sauce has a good balance of flavors - not too rich or overpowering.

To serve our hollandaise sauce, we'll need to warm up some asparagus. This is a key component in the dish, as it provides a nice contrast to the rich and creamy sauce. Once the asparagus is warmed up, we can plate it by placing two pieces of steak on top - one piece slightly leaning over the other. We'll then add a spoonful of crab meat on top of each piece of steak, followed by a spoonful of our hollandaise sauce.

As we finish plating, we can sprinkle some paprika or parsley on top for added flavor and color. Finally, we take a spoonful of our sauce and scrape the bottom of the bowl to add any remaining liquid to the dish. With a final flourish, we present our dish - a beautiful combination of flavors and textures that showcases the art of making hollandaise sauce.

Deglazing the Pan

As we're finishing up with our sauce, it's also time to deglaze the pan. This involves adding a little water to the pan and scraping the bottom to loosen any browned bits or "fond" - which is essentially the flavorful residue that forms at the bottom of the pan when cooking meat. By deglazing the pan, we're able to extract all those flavors and incorporate them into our sauce.

To do this, we simply pour a little water into the pan and use our spoon to scrape the bottom. This will release any browned bits or fond that have formed at the bottom of the pan, adding depth and richness to our sauce. We can then add this mixture back into our sauce, stirring it in gently to combine.

Tips for Making Hollandaise Sauce

When making hollandaise sauce, there are a few key tips to keep in mind. First and foremost, we need to make sure that our egg yolks are at room temperature before starting. This will help them to mix more smoothly with the fat and create a better emulsion.

We also need to be patient when making hollandaise sauce - it can take several minutes for the eggs to thicken and emulsify with the fat. By stirring constantly and adding the butter drop by drop, we can create a smooth and creamy sauce that coats the back of a spoon.

Finally, we need to make sure that our pan is hot enough when starting out. This will help the egg yolks to cook more quickly and prevent them from scrambling or breaking down too much. By heating up the pan slowly over low heat, we can create a rich and creamy sauce that's perfect for accompanying steaks and other dishes.

The Importance of Resting

When making hollandaise sauce, it's also important to let it rest after finishing. This allows the flavors to meld together and the sauce to thicken further, creating a more complex and nuanced flavor profile. By letting our sauce rest for a few minutes before serving, we can create a truly exceptional dish that showcases the art of making hollandaise sauce.

The Final Touches

As we're finishing up with our sauce, we want to add a few final touches to make it truly special. We'll sprinkle some paprika or parsley on top, followed by a spoonful of our sauce. And finally, we take a moment to admire our handiwork - the beautiful combination of flavors and textures that has come together to create a truly exceptional dish.

By following these steps and tips, we can create a rich and creamy hollandaise sauce that's perfect for accompanying steaks and other dishes. Whether you're a seasoned chef or just starting out in the kitchen, making hollandaise sauce is sure to be a rewarding experience that showcases the art of creating complex and nuanced flavors.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat we are making today is steak oscar with sauteed asparagus steak oscar is a very classic french dish the piece the resistance here we are going to be making hollandaise sauce let's talk about our mise en place when we look at asparagus i love asparagus it has the tip this is the big money item so you just take these guys and snap them where it snaps is where it's good until so you can just whip right through these my water is boiling but what do i need to do to it salt salted and it needs to be salty like the seeds lotion all right there we go my veg are in the water so i'm going to wait for that water to come back up to a boil i'm going to let it boil for just a second and then i'm going to take those out and put them right in there i'm going to start dicing my shallot but i'm also going to be keeping one eye on my pot okay so just like an onion all right we cut off the stem end we cut it in half right through the middle we peel off the first layer and the skin okay now tip of the knife to the back but not through the back one time through the middle all right and then downtown so we're looking for really fine dices all right and i'm using plastic container up my asparagus is just about back in a boil give it a little stir around okay for now i'm just going to while i do all of my mise en place i'm just going to turn the burner down and i'm going to put a lid on this guy so my water doesn't boil away okay but we need this pot of water because we're gonna use it for our water bath to make our hollandaise sauce okay all right so let's talk about different cuts of meat for a second and like what a filet mignon is as opposed to other cuts of meat so the reason this steak is so expensive is because it's so tender the more use a mussel gets the tougher it is but the tougher it is it has far more flavor this guy doesn't have much flavor because it hasn't gotten any use and it doesn't have much marbling i always call this like the barbie doll steak you know like it's it's fancy but there's not a lot to it we're gonna cut them in half right through the middle like that so we're gonna give like and we're gonna give them a little squish see look they're so tender i can like squash them now we're going to season our steak right now and we're gonna just let it hang out okay see how it's raining down and getting a nice even coating all right we want to make sure we get salt on all the sides of this okay here we go king crab legs we're like nice legs all right these guys look they break apart at the joint take your kitchen shears all right and we're going to go inside the shell and then we're just going to open this guy right up and the shelves are like they're really easy to cut they're not fit if they're not like they're not like lobster shells they're really thin okay and then look at you can just open these guys right up and look at what we have oh yummy all right so you can go through the knuckle as well look at that's a nice like big knot of crab meat all right okay so we can go and take these out right now so we carefully cut it into bite-sized pieces my steak and my crab prep my mies applause for that done the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to start thinking about my hollandaise sauce this right here is called clarified butter we just are gonna put it in a pot we're gonna just put it on a really low flame so really low so i'm gonna take about i don't know six or seven peppercorns and i'm gonna take the bottom of a little saute pan and i'm just gonna crush them okay put them in your little saute pan so i'm gonna take about three or four little tiny sprigs and put them in my pan as well i'm gonna take two tablespoons of white wine vinegar one two two tablespoons of water right in there and a tablespoon of my shallots right in there and bay leaf all of that right in this little pan so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna turn this on and i'm going to cook this till the liquid is almost gone so in my bowl like this i'm going to put the juice of half a lemon and you put it cut side down and just like i'm going to separate two eggs i'm doing it over something so the whites fall out and right in that bowl with your lemon juice all right so look at what we've got going on here and look my liquid has almost reduced all the way i'm going to reduce it down just a teeny bit more and then i'm gonna turn it off and i'm gonna throw some ice cubes in there because i'm gonna put water back in there and you're like what well why did you cook the water out just to put more water in and it's like we wanna get all the perfume of all those aromatics in some liquid to get into our sauce all right so i'm going to add a couple of ice cubes and i'm just going to let those melt so while i'm just waiting for this to cool down i have a few chives that i'm going to cut beanie feeny feeney see the locomotion long strokes like this back and forth back and forth back and forth okay so now look what i've got i've got a pan back full of water all that water has cooled down all right and so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna strain it right into there all right and then we're done i have a whisk all right and we just beat these up all right so there we go we're gonna let that hang out for a few minutes now let's think about cooking our steaks nice so i'm gonna put my olive oil in i'm going to heat up my pan to really hot nice hot okay so again we don't want to crowd the pan if we crowd the pan it's keeping the steam in there and we won't get brown food we won't get a nice neat crust we'll get steamed gray food so use like longer tongs and lay them in gently so look at it oh you see what i got going on there that's brown food and it tastes good so there we go beautiful gorgeous right okay we're gonna take these guys out and we're gonna let them rest there we go gonna ditch the fat see this crud on the bottom of the pan this is what we call the fond when this is brown and not black this has tons of meat flavor in this pan i'm going to add my shallots like half of the rest of my shallots i'm just going to let those hang out in there in my hot pan i'm going to give it just a tiny little squeeze of oil and some salt and i'm just gonna let this hang out i have this guy all right let's go ahead and beat this up a little bit again okay now i'm putting that on the the water bath okay so this is my egg yolks the reduction that you know with the shallots that i strained the water that i strained into there and eggs and lemon juice remember half a lemon i'm gonna put a very low flame under this one very low all right because now what i want to be doing is ever so gently cooking my eggs okay and you want to see these egg yolks start to get really frothy and fluffy when we start to make an emulsion we have to start off by adding the fat or the oil the butter here drop at a time all right once it gets mixed in another drop and then another drop all right if we just put in all the butter right now what would happen is it would not emulsify and it would separate right out okay so we got to go drop by drop to get started all right and once it drops in keep adding another drop all right all right so once i can tell my emulsion is working then i can start to add my butter a little bit faster like lumps at this point if you see it getting like this pull it off the heat right away and throw in an ice cube and that drops the temperature down and it also gives it some liquid so that it will thin out your sauce a little bit right right back there so then i can add in some more butter all right so if you remember what i said the more butter that you add the thicker it's going to get look it goes right back to really thick again doesn't it yeah we can add a little bit of water to thin it down we now when we get to the point of where we're looking for our sauce to be like sauce should flow we're gonna season with salt now all right so that is looking like a lovely hollandaise sauce to me so first of all it looks like a little bit thicker than heavy cream doesn't it so we take a spoon we mix it around all right it coats the back of the spoon if you can do this and draw your finger through it and it stays then that is the consistency that we're looking for that's called nape means to coat i'm going to put my sauce back on there just to kind of keep it warm so i'm back to here all right a little bit of oil and i'm going to put a little tiny bit of water in here as well and what i'm doing with this i'm going to take my tongs and i'm going to kind of take that water and like scrape the crud off the bottom of the pan so what this is called is deglazing so there we go when we still have a little bit of water in there we're just gonna add our crab meat all right and this is just to warm it up remember the crab is already cooked all right get all those flavors married together okay and then it's done all right and the very last thing a little olive oil a little shallots all right some salt in there okay there we go so asparagus right in this pan now it might have a little bit of water on there try to shake off all that excess water otherwise it will spatter at you all right but remember our asparagus is cooked so we're not looking to cook it anymore we're just looking to warm it up all right so let's plate particular okay i'm going to take a little spoonful of my sauce and i'm going to stir it in with the crab okay just get that all stirred in together we're going to take two pieces of steak we're going to put one exactly on top of the asparagus but we still see the little tips peeking out and so then we're going to take another one and look and lean it we're going to take a spoonful of crab on top of each piece of steak crab right on top of there get a spoonful of sauce scrape the bottom on the side of the bowl and then we just and let it fall off the front of the steak and look at it flows down into through all that crab meat onto the steak into the asparagus 60. and then the very last thing i'm going to do a little sprinky dink and voila youwhat we are making today is steak oscar with sauteed asparagus steak oscar is a very classic french dish the piece the resistance here we are going to be making hollandaise sauce let's talk about our mise en place when we look at asparagus i love asparagus it has the tip this is the big money item so you just take these guys and snap them where it snaps is where it's good until so you can just whip right through these my water is boiling but what do i need to do to it salt salted and it needs to be salty like the seeds lotion all right there we go my veg are in the water so i'm going to wait for that water to come back up to a boil i'm going to let it boil for just a second and then i'm going to take those out and put them right in there i'm going to start dicing my shallot but i'm also going to be keeping one eye on my pot okay so just like an onion all right we cut off the stem end we cut it in half right through the middle we peel off the first layer and the skin okay now tip of the knife to the back but not through the back one time through the middle all right and then downtown so we're looking for really fine dices all right and i'm using plastic container up my asparagus is just about back in a boil give it a little stir around okay for now i'm just going to while i do all of my mise en place i'm just going to turn the burner down and i'm going to put a lid on this guy so my water doesn't boil away okay but we need this pot of water because we're gonna use it for our water bath to make our hollandaise sauce okay all right so let's talk about different cuts of meat for a second and like what a filet mignon is as opposed to other cuts of meat so the reason this steak is so expensive is because it's so tender the more use a mussel gets the tougher it is but the tougher it is it has far more flavor this guy doesn't have much flavor because it hasn't gotten any use and it doesn't have much marbling i always call this like the barbie doll steak you know like it's it's fancy but there's not a lot to it we're gonna cut them in half right through the middle like that so we're gonna give like and we're gonna give them a little squish see look they're so tender i can like squash them now we're going to season our steak right now and we're gonna just let it hang out okay see how it's raining down and getting a nice even coating all right we want to make sure we get salt on all the sides of this okay here we go king crab legs we're like nice legs all right these guys look they break apart at the joint take your kitchen shears all right and we're going to go inside the shell and then we're just going to open this guy right up and the shelves are like they're really easy to cut they're not fit if they're not like they're not like lobster shells they're really thin okay and then look at you can just open these guys right up and look at what we have oh yummy all right so you can go through the knuckle as well look at that's a nice like big knot of crab meat all right okay so we can go and take these out right now so we carefully cut it into bite-sized pieces my steak and my crab prep my mies applause for that done the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to start thinking about my hollandaise sauce this right here is called clarified butter we just are gonna put it in a pot we're gonna just put it on a really low flame so really low so i'm gonna take about i don't know six or seven peppercorns and i'm gonna take the bottom of a little saute pan and i'm just gonna crush them okay put them in your little saute pan so i'm gonna take about three or four little tiny sprigs and put them in my pan as well i'm gonna take two tablespoons of white wine vinegar one two two tablespoons of water right in there and a tablespoon of my shallots right in there and bay leaf all of that right in this little pan so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna turn this on and i'm going to cook this till the liquid is almost gone so in my bowl like this i'm going to put the juice of half a lemon and you put it cut side down and just like i'm going to separate two eggs i'm doing it over something so the whites fall out and right in that bowl with your lemon juice all right so look at what we've got going on here and look my liquid has almost reduced all the way i'm going to reduce it down just a teeny bit more and then i'm gonna turn it off and i'm gonna throw some ice cubes in there because i'm gonna put water back in there and you're like what well why did you cook the water out just to put more water in and it's like we wanna get all the perfume of all those aromatics in some liquid to get into our sauce all right so i'm going to add a couple of ice cubes and i'm just going to let those melt so while i'm just waiting for this to cool down i have a few chives that i'm going to cut beanie feeny feeney see the locomotion long strokes like this back and forth back and forth back and forth okay so now look what i've got i've got a pan back full of water all that water has cooled down all right and so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna strain it right into there all right and then we're done i have a whisk all right and we just beat these up all right so there we go we're gonna let that hang out for a few minutes now let's think about cooking our steaks nice so i'm gonna put my olive oil in i'm going to heat up my pan to really hot nice hot okay so again we don't want to crowd the pan if we crowd the pan it's keeping the steam in there and we won't get brown food we won't get a nice neat crust we'll get steamed gray food so use like longer tongs and lay them in gently so look at it oh you see what i got going on there that's brown food and it tastes good so there we go beautiful gorgeous right okay we're gonna take these guys out and we're gonna let them rest there we go gonna ditch the fat see this crud on the bottom of the pan this is what we call the fond when this is brown and not black this has tons of meat flavor in this pan i'm going to add my shallots like half of the rest of my shallots i'm just going to let those hang out in there in my hot pan i'm going to give it just a tiny little squeeze of oil and some salt and i'm just gonna let this hang out i have this guy all right let's go ahead and beat this up a little bit again okay now i'm putting that on the the water bath okay so this is my egg yolks the reduction that you know with the shallots that i strained the water that i strained into there and eggs and lemon juice remember half a lemon i'm gonna put a very low flame under this one very low all right because now what i want to be doing is ever so gently cooking my eggs okay and you want to see these egg yolks start to get really frothy and fluffy when we start to make an emulsion we have to start off by adding the fat or the oil the butter here drop at a time all right once it gets mixed in another drop and then another drop all right if we just put in all the butter right now what would happen is it would not emulsify and it would separate right out okay so we got to go drop by drop to get started all right and once it drops in keep adding another drop all right all right so once i can tell my emulsion is working then i can start to add my butter a little bit faster like lumps at this point if you see it getting like this pull it off the heat right away and throw in an ice cube and that drops the temperature down and it also gives it some liquid so that it will thin out your sauce a little bit right right back there so then i can add in some more butter all right so if you remember what i said the more butter that you add the thicker it's going to get look it goes right back to really thick again doesn't it yeah we can add a little bit of water to thin it down we now when we get to the point of where we're looking for our sauce to be like sauce should flow we're gonna season with salt now all right so that is looking like a lovely hollandaise sauce to me so first of all it looks like a little bit thicker than heavy cream doesn't it so we take a spoon we mix it around all right it coats the back of the spoon if you can do this and draw your finger through it and it stays then that is the consistency that we're looking for that's called nape means to coat i'm going to put my sauce back on there just to kind of keep it warm so i'm back to here all right a little bit of oil and i'm going to put a little tiny bit of water in here as well and what i'm doing with this i'm going to take my tongs and i'm going to kind of take that water and like scrape the crud off the bottom of the pan so what this is called is deglazing so there we go when we still have a little bit of water in there we're just gonna add our crab meat all right and this is just to warm it up remember the crab is already cooked all right get all those flavors married together okay and then it's done all right and the very last thing a little olive oil a little shallots all right some salt in there okay there we go so asparagus right in this pan now it might have a little bit of water on there try to shake off all that excess water otherwise it will spatter at you all right but remember our asparagus is cooked so we're not looking to cook it anymore we're just looking to warm it up all right so let's plate particular okay i'm going to take a little spoonful of my sauce and i'm going to stir it in with the crab okay just get that all stirred in together we're going to take two pieces of steak we're going to put one exactly on top of the asparagus but we still see the little tips peeking out and so then we're going to take another one and look and lean it we're going to take a spoonful of crab on top of each piece of steak crab right on top of there get a spoonful of sauce scrape the bottom on the side of the bowl and then we just and let it fall off the front of the steak and look at it flows down into through all that crab meat onto the steak into the asparagus 60. and then the very last thing i'm going to do a little sprinky dink and voila you\n"