Easy Hollandaise Sauce - Blender VS Classic - Food Science!

Today on

food

passion we get a little spicy and talk about one of the

classic

hollandaise

sauce

s, it is considered one of the five mother

sauce

s but has a reputation for being difficult to make, but is that reputation ready? For rebuttal, let's find out as I put on my culinary mythbuster hat for this episode, testing not only

blender

preparations versus

classic

preparations, but also less traditional methods that might prove even easier, so let's not waste a split second, Let's go ahead and get this started. four large eggs and you know, for all the yolk separation techniques I've tried over the years, I really like the classic double shell juggle.

I really think that one works better, the main reason is that the edges of the egg shell here are actually quite sharp and it will help us cut through that egg membrane a little faster, so we just want to go ahead and separate the four yolks. and as for the egg whites, we definitely want to keep them. I'm just going to throw them away. in a bag and freeze them, but now that we're done putting together, let's go ahead and start the classic Dutch preparation by putting a metal bowl in a double boiler. I'm going to use a pretty classic combination here and I'm going to keep this constant in all the tests we do, in addition to our four egg yolks, we have a tablespoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice, about a half teaspoon of salt, and about a quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper, so we just want to get started.

Whisk this vigorously as the double boiler comes up to temperature, it really works best with slow, even heat, so once the double boiler starts to boil it's a good idea to reduce the temperature to low so we only have a gentle steam cooking. We're just going to continue beating these eggs as we heat them up and you'll notice that they start to change color and increase a little bit in volume, once we see that characteristic lightening of color and it thickens a little bit, we can start to add half a cup of butter, we're going to drizzle this slowly, we want to continue whisking vigorously so the butter breaks up into blobs and emulsifies with the eggs, so we just want to continue to drizzle and whisk, drizzle and whisk until I've used our full four ounces of butter and I'm using salted butter here. .

If you use unsalted butter, you want to add about another teaspoon of salt anyway, once we have our last splash of melted butter in there, we just want to continue whisking. this vigorously in a double boiler until it thickens to the consistency we're looking for, ultimately whatever it is is up to you, it's ready to serve right now, but the more we keep whisking this over the heat, the thicker it will get, but just keep in mind that the main place I see people have problems with

hollandaise

sauce is actually overcooking it, you can end up scrambled eggs and you will definitely end up with a broken sauce and a broken heart that way if yours ends up getting a little too thick, just add a tablespoon of water at a time until you get the consistency you want for me.

This is almost perfect, it's nice and thick but still super silky. When you pour it with a spoon you should definitely see a stream and not drips and it should be able to easily cover the back of a spoon so we want to go ahead and give it a quick taste for seasoning and if it needs a little more salt this is the one. moment, but go ahead and serve this immediately over some salt. eggs, canadian bacon and a split toasted english muffin give us the classic eggs benedict which really is a beautiful sauce so hold on we're done hold on I've always been a skeptical guy and I'm a little irritated by the drizzle like that's all that slow drizzling and gradual beating of the eggs really needed.

Let's explore a couple of other options here and see how those sauces turn out, and as before, we'll whisk the egg yolks and other ingredients in a double boiler. until it lightens and thickens a little and then we will add cold butter straight from the refrigerator. Yes, that's cold butter. I've always been a cool guy and at first I was going to put the butter in three batches, but after thinking about it for a minute, I decided, hey, let's just dump everything in there and we're basically done. We just want to continue whisking and mixing this in a double boiler until all the butter is melted and then the hollandaise sauce is thickened to the point. consistency we are looking for again cook it a little longer if you want it to be thicker.

I left this one a little thinner than the last, but it's still a beautiful hollandaise, so apparently the need to slowly drizzle in the butter equals So Much Culinary Nonsense, although I suppose you could argue that cold butter slowly melting with the eggs is still kind of a slow drizzle of butter, so let's try one more scenario. I haven't seen anyone else do it this way. I call it the double boiler catastrophe and this is supposed to be the worst case scenario. We'll just throw everything, including our melted butter, into the double boiler. No beating the eggs, nothing now, as any licensed culinary instructor will tell you. just terrible, this will never work, you can't achieve a stable emulsion by just throwing all that fat in there and starting to churn it, those little droplets of fat won't be able to distribute evenly throughout the sacre bleu which seems to have worked well and understand why let's take a moment and let's talk about the

science

behind the properties of the egg.

Eggs have four emulsions. There are several different proteins and eggs that help with emulsification, but the main thing we're going to talk about is lectin, which is mainly found in egg yolks, the important thing about this particular protein is that it has one end that is hydrophobic. and another that is hydrophilic, meaning that one end is attracted to water and the other end is rejected by water, making them extremely versatile emulsifiers. Something on the left would represent an egg cream that is mostly water with a little bit of fat and something on the right would represent something like days or mayonnaise that is mostly fat with a little bit of water, that's the magic of lectin as well.

Now that we are like thieves with that explanation of emulsification, you know how we are going to continue whisking and cooking this until it has the consistency that we are looking for and not keep insisting on this, but you do want to start breaking up and serving this excellent sauce immediately and as we can see that even though these parties were done completely the wrong way, they turned out very well, but now that we know a little more about the magic of emulsification, let's see what other kind of shenanigans we can get up to, so I'm going to go.

Go ahead and make two different

blender

versions and compare that hollandaise sauce to the more traditional double boiler methods and we'll just throw everything except the melted butter in there and give it a whirl on high for about a minute, you'll see the color lightens up a little bit. , at that point we want to drizzle our butter, but this time the butter needs to be very hot, basically as hot as it can get before it starts to brown, supposedly that will be enough to cook our eggs. I'm a little hesitant about that, but I think it helps the sauce thicken, so we'll continue blending on high speed for a minute or two until it's nice and thick.

The more we blend, the thicker it will be. I understand, but this is perfect for me, but what about the eggs in there? They are the ones that are really cooked. You know, people have assured me that through a combination of the heat of the hot butter and the heat produced by the friction of the blender. that will be enough to cook those eggs, but I found my skepticism burning once again, so let's do a final test to see if that's true or not, but I didn't really feel like it would be a fair test to use that blender because it seemed like they should hold together. mostly with plastic rubber bands and a bit of hope so I thought I'd use my armored ssin blender which is made of a bit sturdier material and definitely produces a bit more thermal friction as it works the same as before.

We're going to dump everything except the melted absolute in here and mix it in until it starts to lighten and thicken a little, once it's about doubled in volume we're going to go ahead and drizzle in our 1/2 cup of hot butter. Now we could get away with putting all that butter in at once. I was a little worried that with how hot it was it might burn part of the eggs, but I didn't try that part, so if you ever get I'm ready to try that, definitely leave a comment and let me know what happens anyway once that we have all the butter in there, we just want to continue mixing until it's nice and thick and you can see how hot the butter was.

Actually, that glass is steaming. a little I wanted to give this a good chance to work, so I continue blending until it's the maximum thickness I like. The immersion blender was hot, but are these eggs cooked through? Let's take a quick look with our instant read thermometer. and I discovered it and I was getting readings in the mid 90's, so no, I wouldn't really consider those eggs cooked, but hey, you know, neither are eggs in mayonnaise, so I'm not too worried because I ended up doing another test. -Chamber where I mixed it even more aggressively and managed to break a hundred, but it was still like 105 or so, which is still not cooked technically speaking, so if you're worried about getting a raw deal, maybe you'd better do it.

I'm still sticking with the double boiler methods, but hey, I like to eat runny yolks all the time, so obviously I love living dangerously, so let's go ahead and pour some of our

easy

blendable hollandaise sauce and I have to say that a even though this came out. By using a blender instead of the traditional double boiler, the texture and flavors were perfect, which leads me to believe that the cooking of the egg is actually not as critical to this as the general principles of emulsification and the fact that incorporate air into the sauce. I'll go even further and suggest that it's actually the cooking or rather the overcooking of the eggs that gets people into trouble and makes them think, "Oh, this is very difficult because if you cook the eggs beyond a hundred forty degrees, they're going to cook." to start coagulating and you'll end up a mess, the blender methods are definitely more foolproof, but now thanks to me you know they're not actually fully cooking those eggs, sorry anyway, hope you enjoyed it.

Today's episode of passion for

food

, if you like me below and consider subscribing and ring that little bell so you don't miss our future episodes, this has been Graham with a passion for food.