Béarnaise sauce is part of the Hollandaise family of sauces. It goes well with fish, meat and vegetables where its luxurious smoothness and savory flavor complements whatever it covers. Julia Child helped me recreate a food experience to good effect. Read on to find out more!
I’ll dip my fries in just about anything
I learned to love dipping my fries in mayo when we lived in Spain. This naturally led to experimenting with other sauces and making my own mayonnaise and alioli (aka aioli outside of the Iberian peninsula).
But an unplanned layover in Iceland introduced us to the joys of eating béarnaise sauce with fries. Béarnaise is used much like ketchup and mustard in the US. It’s poured over anything and everything.
Now, I’ve made mayonnaise with a stick blender. It’s pretty easy to obtain a very tasty result. But I wanted to try my hand at doing it the “old fashioned” way. Who better to teach the proper techniques than Julia Child?
Step by step instructions for Hollandaise and its variations are found in Volume One of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. and various parts of the internet.
My plan was to use my stick blender to make the sauce in my double boiler. (Last seen when making praline semifreddo).
Well, Murphy’s Law was in full effect on this day. The stick blender stopped working.
No biggie, I thought. I’ll use my hand mixer.
But that was too awkward to use in the double boiler.
No worries, says I, “Be like Julia and use a wire whisk.”
Yeah…
Turns out my hands no longer operate like they used to and I couldn’t manipulate the whisk fast enough to keep the sauce from first turning granular and then splitting altogether.
That’s when Julia spoke to me from the pages of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One. She described several techniques to remedy all the ways a Hollandaise sauce and its cousins can go wrong. And they worked!
It took some patience, but I ended up with a proper béarnaise. Rick and I happily dipped our steak fries in it. We have some leftover that will top a lovely salmon filet later in the week.
Thanks, Julia!
Thanks also for your blender version, which I will use from now on.
This week we’re celebrating potatoes at I Heart Cooking clubs. Drop by to see what the other bloggers have created this week.
What an interesting story and process to fix a broken sauce? It’s lovely.
I always use Julia’s recipe when I make this! Such good stuff. 🙂
BTW, just want to say we’ve just posted our last blog post. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your blog, and I’ll still be visiting. But we’ve got a lot of activities lined up that will be occupying my time, so my visits will be much more sporadic in the future. Best wishes to you.