Skip to main content
Main

Bearnaise Sauce

A sauce made with vinegar, tarragon, shallots, white sauce, eggs, and butter, strained before serving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tarragon and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Bearnaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Combine vinegars and minced shallots in a saucepan. Boil until reduced by half.

  2. Mix in the white sauce.

Enrich and finish

  1. Separate yolks from whites of eggs. Whisk each separately.

  2. Slowly add yolks to sauce, ensuring it does not boil to prevent curdling.

  3. Remove saucepan from heat and gradually add butter in small pieces.

  4. Strain the sauce before serving.

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. Tarragon + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Vinegar + tarragontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sauce + shallottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 gently cook.
Butter
Adds richness and body, forming a smooth emulsion with the yolks.
White sauce
Adds body and stability, helping the sauce hold together.
Tarragon vinegar
Provides sharp acidity and the characteristic tarragon aroma.
Shallots
Add a mild aromatic onion flavor as they reduce with the vinegar.

The step that matters

Add the yolks without letting the sauce boil. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the sauce boils, the proteins scramble and curdle, so the sauce turns grainy and cannot form a smooth emulsion with the butter.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, tarragon, sauce, butter, egg):

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Chivefits less well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, tarragon, sauce, butter, egg. 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.

You might also like

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