May 5th, 2010
The first times I tried making sauce béarnaise were, to put it plainly, a pain in the ass. It’s just something you need to get the hang of in some way. The temperature can’t rise too high and you should be patiently stirring for a while. And when it breaks all
your work is messed up and you end up depressed and feeling like it’s never gonna work. But it will, I promise.
And when it works it’s just amazing. My all-time favorite butter sauce for meat and basically anything else. Yesterday I had it with some entrecôte steak, that I cooked sous-vide at 120° for 45 Minutes and then seared in a cast iron pan. It was definitely one of the most delicious things I had in the last couple of weeks.
I served it with some oven-baked fries and a simple salad with a sherry vinegar vinaigrette. Nothing fancy.
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March 13th, 2010
Finally! We already had the Beet Beurre Blanc and Orange Beurre Blanc but now we’re coming to a real treat. The mother of all butter sauces. I’m still drooling over my laptop, when I even think about it. It enhances the flavour of almost everything you put it on. White asparagus (grown without any exposure to light) is the best known example, at least here in Germany. I love to put in on eggs benedict, salmon or even pizza (yes, you heard me right!).
Sauce Hollandaise doesn’t come from the Netherlands, as the name implies. It’s a classic french sauce and only called hollandaise because for some time during World War I, butter was only available imported from the Netherlands and Belgium. Before that, it was called Sauce Isigny, after the town of Isigny-sur-Mer, former butter-capital of France.
Well, anyway, the important thing when making hollandaise is stirring and not getting the stuff too hot, as the egg protein denaturates and messes up the beautiful emulsion. If however you break your hollandaise, you can start over with new eggs and add the broken hollandaise sauce just like you usually add just the butter.
It’s quite likely, that you mess up hollandaise the first times you try it – at least that’s what happened to me – but you should definitely not give up. Seriously, it’s worth it!
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March 5th, 2010
Duck à l’Orange (Canard à l’Orange) is a classic french dish, that never fails to please people. It is usually made with a whole roast duck, but I prefer just making it with duck breasts. Another great thing about this dish is the possibility of decanting some of the duck-fat, that is great for sautéing potatoes in it. Or anything else, actually!
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