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Sauce

Hollandaise Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 bowl

  1. Fill a bowl with hot water, then pour the hot water out of the bowl and wipe the bowl dry.

  2. Add the butter to the bowl and beat until soft and creamy.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the egg yolks one by one to the butter and beat until blended with the butter.

  2. Mix in the lemon juice, salt, and cayenne and beat until smooth.

  3. Remove the spoon and beat the mixture with an egg beater for five minutes.

  4. Place the bowl in a double boiler with boiling water.

  5. Add the boiling water to the butter and egg mixture.

  6. Cook until thick as mayonnaise, beating constantly.

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. Lemon + peppertop 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

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the butter and thicken the sauce as they cook, giving it a rich body.
Butter
Provides fat that, emulsified with the yolks, gives the sauce its smooth, rich texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and yolk flavor.

The step that matters

Cook until thick as mayonnaise, beating constantly. Egg yolks thicken and emulsify with butter only within a gentle temperature range. Too much heat scrambles the yolks and curdles the sauce, while constant beating keeps the emulsion even and prevents lumps.

“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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