Emulsions & Pan Sauces · Sauce
Sauce Béarnaise
- Advanced
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 60 ml white wine vinegar
- 60 ml dry white wine
- 40 g shallot, finely minced
- 10 g tarragon stalks, plus 8 g leaves chopped
- 8 g chervil, chopped
- 12 black peppercorns, cracked
- 3 egg yolks, about 54 g
- 200 g clarified butter, warm at 50C (122F)
- 3 g fine salt
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesBuilding an emulsionSteaming: basket, leaf and lidStraining & passing through a sieve
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · egg · alcohol
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
- Simmer the vinegar, wine, shallot, tarragon stalks and cracked peppercorns until reduced to 45 ml, thick enough that a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a track that fills back slowly.
- Strain the reduction, pressing the solids hard, and cool it to blood heat; you want about 45 ml of sharp, shallot sweet liquid and no more.
- Whisk the yolks into the cooled reduction over water held at 70C (158F) until the sabayon holds a figure of eight on its own surface and reads 65C (149F).
- Off the heat, thread in the clarified butter, drop by drop for the first 50 g and then in a steady stream, until the sauce holds the shape a spoon cuts into it.
- Fold in the chopped tarragon and chervil off the heat and hold at 55C (131F); herbs added any earlier lose their anise to the steam.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques 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.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
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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