One of French cuisine's five mother sauces — a warm emulsion of egg yolks and butter flavoured with lemon, served over eggs Benedict, asparagus, and fish.
The emulsion challenge
Hollandaise is an emulsion sauce — fat (clarified butter) suspended in a water-based medium (egg yolks) with no natural emulsifier other than the lecithin in the egg yolks. It’s the most technically demanding of the five French mother sauces because the emulsion breaks irreversibly if:
- The temperature gets too high (the eggs scramble — above 65°C)
- The butter is added too quickly (the emulsion can’t form)
- The sauce is left too long without being served
The classic technique involves whisking egg yolks with a vinegar reduction over a bain-marie (double boiler) until thick and fluffy, then slowly drizzling in warm clarified butter while whisking continuously.
Béarnaise — the variation
Béarnaise sauce is hollandaise flavoured with tarragon, shallots, and chervil. It’s the standard accompaniment to steak in French cuisine. Despite being called a derivative, béarnaise was actually created before hollandaise was named.
Modern shortcuts
Blender hollandaise (all ingredients blended, hot butter poured in) and immersion blender methods reliably produce a stable sauce with far less risk of breaking, at the cost of slightly less airy texture.
The five mother sauces
Hollandaise is one of Escoffier’s five mother sauces alongside béchamel, velouté, espagnole (brown sauce), and sauce tomat.