Hollandaise Recipes

If you are looking for free recipes for hollandaise sauce, you have come to the right place. LoveToKnow offers a full array of recipes for hollandaise variations, from classic to quick and easy.

Tricky but Impressive

Hollandaise is a very impressive sauce to be able to make, but it's also somewhat chancy. It must be made immediately before serving - some people claim it can be kept warm in a thermos until needed - so if it doesn't 'gel' right, there you are right before serving the guests and you have no sauce.

Practice making hollandaise a few times on your family before trying it out on friends.

Lemon, Butter - What Could Be Better?

Hollandaise is essentially just a lemon-flavored butter whipped to a creamy state. Doesn't sound so hard, does it?

But wait - butter is an oil, and oil doesn't want to mix with non-oils. So to get the butter to agree to blend with the lemon juice, you have to emulsify it using egg yolk, which causes the butter and juice to cling to one another.

The tricky part comes in with the egg yolk. If you make the sauce over too high a heat, the yolk will just cook rather than emulsify, and you'll have floating bits of cooked yolk in a butter-lemon juice, with the butter rising to the top and the lemon juice sinking. Your sauce has curdled.

You avoid this by not allowing the pan to get too hot; use a double boiler, don't allow the water in the lower pan to boil and don't allow the top pan to actually sit in the water, but just be heated by the steam off the water beneath it.

Constant Attention Required

A hollandaise recipe is very quick to prepare if you have all your ingredients out, but it requires constant motion on your part. The butter is added a little bit at a time to the juice/yolk froth, and you must blend-blend-blend the entire time. Don't look away or set it down until you have completely finished the sauce.

Then tell your guests to sit down, because here comes the Hollandaise.

Hollandaise sauce is the topping of choice for Eggs Benedict. Serve it also over fresh gently-cooked asparagus, cauliflower or even mild-flavored fish.