Cooking Basics For Dummies by Bryan Miller

Author:Bryan Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Egg in Your Sauce

Egg-based sauces are (you guessed it!) based on eggs rather than on meat stock or butter and cream, although most egg-based sauces also contain butter, stock, and/or cream. Hollandaise is the most common of all egg-based sauces.

Egg-based sauces are typically rich and a little goes a long way, but they’re also very versatile, changing with just a few different herbs, vegetables, or cream into all kinds of variations. But most of them start with your basic hollandaise sauce.

Hollandaise

Hollandaise is a good exercise for beginners because if you blow it, you can repair it easily (see the tip at the end of the recipe). The rich lemon-tinged hollandaise has chameleon-like qualities: add tarragon and chervil, and you have béarnaise (excellent on salmon); add tomato, and you have Choron (good with steak); fold in lightly whipped double cream, and you have Chantilly, also called mousseline (decadently delicious on chicken); add dried mustard, and you have a fine accompaniment to boiled vegetables.

Tools: Whisk, bowl, saucepan, rubber spatula

Preparation time: About 10 minutes

Cooking time: About 10 minutes

Serves: 6

4 egg yolks, separated (see illustrated instructions for separating an egg in Chapter 9)

1 tablespoon cold water

110 grams (4 ounces) room-temperature butter, cut into 8 pieces

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Salt and white pepper

1 In a heat-resistant bowl that will fit snugly over a saucepan (in Step 2), whisk the egg yolks for about 2 minutes or until they’re thick and pale yellow. Add the water, whisking for about another minute, until the mixture easily coats a spoon.

2 Set the bowl with the egg mixture on top of a saucepan of water that is almost boiling (ensure the bowl isn’t touching the water). Heat until just warm, about 3 minutes, stirring constantly with a rubber spatula or whisk.

3 Add the butter 30 grams (1 ounce) at a time, whisking vigorously until each batch is incorporated completely. Continue cooking, stirring and scraping the sides of the bowl, until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a metal spoon. Add the lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste and cook about 1 minute more, or until the sauce is smooth and heated through. Figure 8-2 shows creamy hollandaise.

Tip: The most common foul-up that beginners make when preparing hollandaise is leaving the heat on until it curdles. If that happens, or if the sauce becomes too thick, beat in 1 to 2 tablespoons of boiling water. Stir vigorously until the sauce becomes smooth. To avoid lumpy hollandaise, reduce the heat to simmer.

Per serving: Calories 175 (From Fat 167); Fat 19g (Saturated 11g); Cholesterol 183mg; Sodium 104mg; Carbohydrate 1g (Dietary Fibre 0g); Protein 2g.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.