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Sauce

Hollandaise Sauce

A sauce made by melting butter, whisking in egg yolks and salt, and heating over simmering water until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the egg yolks and a pinch of salt. Whisk together until well combined.

  3. Place the bowl over a pot of simmering water and stir until the sauce thickens.

Serve

  1. Serve over baked fish.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the emulsion.
Egg yolks
Their proteins thicken gently with heat and emulsify the butter into the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening over simmering water. Egg yolks set at a moderate temperature; if the heat is too high the proteins scramble and the sauce curdles. Gentle, steady stirring over barely simmering water keeps it smooth and thick.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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