Hollandaise Sauce

How I lived before hollandaise I do not care to remember. Warm, velvety and (most deliciously) buttery, I love it on toasted sourdough with a soft boiled egg, or as my dipping sauce for artichoke.

Martha Stewart Cooking School is a must have for anyone like me, trying to learn how to cook on their own. She teaches you basics in a clear easy to follow way, pointing out how and where in the recipe variations can be made. I actually came across it at the library, and after giving it a test drive decided I had to own it!

Here is the recipe as well as some notes from Martha found in the book.

Recipe from: Martha Stewart's Cooking School

Here, we used a white wine reduction, but you can skip that step and simply whisk eggs with 1 teaspoon lemon juice and 1/4 cup boiling water. As one of the French "mother sauces," its preparation is a basic culinary technique that can be varied to create other sauces in the same family (often referred to as "warm emulsions"). By changing the acidic liquid to blood orange juice and zest, you get sauce Maltaise, typically served over steamed asparagus; tangerine juice and zest flavor Mikado sauce. Perhaps the best-known variation is Béarnaise, a traditional accompaniment for steak. To make it, prepare the hollandaise as directed, adding tarragon (the defining flavor of Béarnaise) to the reduction mixture. As it is designed to demonstrate, the method is the key to making the sauce, not the specific ingredients used to give it flavor.
When making hollandaise or any of it's variations, using gentle heat is critical to achieving the right consistency.

You will need:

- 1/4 cup dry white wine

- 1 T white wine vinegar

- 1 T minced shallot

- 1/2 t cracked black peppercorns

- 3 T boiling water

- 3 large egg yolks

- 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature and cut into tablespoons

- pinch cayenne pepper

Directions:

Make reduction

Combine wine, vinegar, shallot, and peppercorns in a small skillet over medium-high heat; cook until reduced to one tablespoon, about 3 to 4 minutes. Add the boiling water and strain through a fine sieve into a heatproof nonreactive (stainless-steel or glass) bowl.

Prepare hot-water bath

Fill a medium sauce pan with 2 inches of water and bring to a boil, then reduce heat so water is barely simmering.

Heat egg yolks

Add egg yolks to strained reduction and whisk, off the heat, until they become pale. Place bowl over saucepan with simmering water. Whisking constantly, cook until the mixture is thick enough to hold a trail from the whisk and begins to hold it's shape when drizzled from the whisk. Remove from heat. Wipe off any mixture that may have cooked to the side of the pot with a damp paper towel to prevent any lumps from forming.

Incorporate butter

Whisking constantly, add butter 1 tablespoon at a time, whisking until each addition is incorporated completely before adding the next. When all the butter has been added, season with lemon juice, salt, and cayenne. The sauce should be thick but still able to drizzle from a spoon (and it should form a pool, not a mound). If it is too thick, thin it with a little water.