Hollandaise Sauce

Classic French cooking, specifically basic sauces, is one of the skills that I wish I could master or at least begin to understand since I feel that the base recipes can be launched into a variety of dishes. Hollandaise and mayonnaise are really the only two classic French sauces that I've begun to become sufficient at making. Homemade mayonnaise really trumps and ruins anything store bought and will easily elevate any aoili that you traditionally use store bought mayonnaise for. Hollandaise is, well, just amazing if made correctly. I've enjoyed it over Jessica's homemade brioche and poached egg with a slice of serrano ham giving some elegance to the classic eggs benedict.

I think that I'm relatively good at making these sauces since they a science experiment at heart given that they are both emulsions with mayonnaise being a oil-egg yolk emulsion while hollandaise is a butter-egg yolk emulsion with both containing water. Essentially, an emulsion is two liquids that don't normally mix (fat and water) are mixed with an emulsifier and become evenly dispersed. One of the best emulsifiers are egg yolks since they contain so many proteins. These proteins when beaten and heated will denature (fall apart) and expose their hydrophobic (water hating) areas and hydrophilic (water loving areas) areas to the oil and water. The hydrophobic parts of the proteins will associate with the fats since these are, too, hydrophobic while the hydrophilic parts will interact with the water. Basically, this functions to reduce the tension between the water and oil interface to form the emulsion and stabilizes the emulsion by preventing the oil from interacting with the water and separating out into two layers. Simply put: the egg yolk allows for a homogeneous mixture of oil and water to be formed.

Emulsions are a bit difficult to form and keep together, but I attribute my ability to do so to my science background and knowing how interactions like this "feel" and look. I used my hollandaise to dip my artichoke in, which is new to me since I grew up eating them with melted butter with lemon juice. I followed Julia Child's recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, which calls for butter, egg yolks, water, lemon juice, and salt. Being Julia Child, this recipe turned out a lot more buttery than I'm used to, but this was fine for my artichoke application!