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Hollandaise Sauce

A creamy sauce made from butter, egg yolks, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the butter

  1. Work the butter in a bowl of cold water until it reaches a waxy consistency.

  2. Divide the butter into three equal pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine one piece of butter, egg yolks, and lemon juice.

  2. Place the saucepan in a larger pan with hot water and stir constantly until blended.

  3. As the sauce thickens, add the second piece of butter, then the third.

  4. Slowly add hot water while beating constantly.

  5. Keep the water in the larger saucepan just below boiling.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Unsalted butter
Provides fat that emulsifies with the yolks, giving the sauce its rich, smooth body.
Egg yolks
Their proteins set gently with heat and emulsify the butter, thickening the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the emulsion stable.
Hot water
Loosens the sauce and keeps it at a pourable consistency while beating.

The step that matters

Keep the water just below boiling. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but scramble if they get too hot. Water just below boiling supplies steady, moderate heat, so the sauce thickens smoothly while the butter emulsifies without curdling.

“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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