Swedish · Sauce
Hovmästarsås
- Easy
- 12 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, melting away silken.
Ingredients
- 60 g Swedish sweet mustard
- 15 g Dijon mustard
- 25 g caster sugar
- 30 ml white wine vinegar
- 150 ml neutral rapeseed oil
- 25 g dill, chopped fine
- salt and white pepper
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Whisk the two mustards with the sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper until no grains of sugar grate on the bowl and the base is glossy and slack.
- Pour the oil in a thread no thicker than string, whisking without pause, until the sauce climbs to the body of loose mayonnaise and holds a lazy ribbon.
- Stir in the dill and leave it half an hour for the vinegar and sugar to settle into the mustard.
- Taste for the correct order: sweet first, then mustard heat, then vinegar last. Correct with sugar or vinegar, never with more oil.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Building an emulsion 40 recipes
- It visibly thickens as the fat goes in, heavier and more opaque than either part was alone, which is the emulsion announcing itself.
- At no point is there a pool of free fat sitting ahead of the work: fat went in no faster than it disappeared into the body.
- Glossy and homogeneous, with no slick floating on top and no visible droplets standing apart in it.
- It clings: coating what it is put on and holding a line, rather than running off and splitting into a puddle at the plate’s edge.
- It survives standing: minutes later there is no ring of weeping liquid underneath and no film of fat breaking out on the surface.
Where it goes wrong The fat went in faster than the shear could break it up, or the temperature drifted out of the range the method needs: it breaks into grease over a thin liquid, and whisking the broken thing harder does nothing. The rescue is a fresh base, with the broken sauce worked into it slowly, as if it were the fat.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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