Skip to main content
Main

Hollandaise Sauce

A sauce made from egg yolks, flour, butter, pepper, salt, mace, vinegar, and water, emulsified by whisking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and hazelnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 464 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Beat the egg yolks with flour and a small piece of butter.

  2. Add pepper, salt, mace, vinegar, and water.

  3. Heat the mixture in a saucepan, stirring until it just begins to boil.

Finish the sauce

  1. Remove from heat and add a good lump of butter.

  2. Stir continuously in the same direction until the butter is fully incorporated.

  3. Serve the sauce immediately; do not return to heat after adding butter.

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. Flour + hazelnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together464 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Egg yolks
Emulsify the butter and thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that, emulsified with the yolks, gives the sauce its smooth body.
Flour
Helps stabilise the yolk mixture so it is less likely to scramble under heat.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Stir continuously over gentle heat, then keep the sauce off the heat. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot, and butter added to a sauce that is still too hot can break it. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly and helps the butter emulsify into a smooth sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, butter, hazelnut, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, butter, hazelnut, pepper, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More hollandaise sauce recipes

Mock 3 See all 212 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes