….Hollandaise sauce

Hollandaise sauce – not only meant for egg benedict…..

Who would have guest a person can write an entire post on a sauce with only 3 ingredients. From a young age I enjoyed cooking. Trying out new recipes, testing flavours, adapting recipes to my liking. I can still remember my very first “real” cookbook I received from my mom with amazing recipes like sticky ribs, beef roll and egg benedict. I am pretty sure I enjoyed it more than what my parents and sister did, as they had to test all my recipes.

I tried to make my very first hollandaise sauce when I was about 14 years old. I loved it – but I can clearly remember by dads expression on his face and his words – “I hope we don’t get this again”….. Needless to say, I never tried making it again, but will always order egg benedict (when they do offer it) for breakfast.

Have you ever wondered where Hollandaise sauce originated from? Ok, its maybe self explanatory within the name, but I thought I’d just confirm. So according to Sauce History, the sauce we now call Hollandaise actually use to be called Sauce Isigny – named after a town Isigny-sur-Mer which was known for its good quality butter. The surprising part of this is that it seems that it originated actually in France. So why do we call it than Holland-aise. Well, according to “history”, during World War 1, butter production in France came to an end and they had to import butter from Holland – hence Hollandaise – indicating actually the origins of the butter and not actually the sauce.

So yesterday we had a really bad day, and I just needed some comfort food. We decided to make some egg, steak and (sweet potato) chips – and I craved Hollandaise. I can remember that making Hollandaise from scratch was pretty hard, as you had to be so careful not to over cook the sauce. I honestly didn’t have the energy to try it and decided to look for an alternative. I found a microwave recipe and decided to give it a go. As always, I ended up changing the recipe slightly to better fit my taste. You can find the original recipe from AllRecipes

This was honestly the quickest and easiest sauce I made in a very long time and of course you can play around with flavours. Next time I will add some more spice to the sauce or perhaps some fresh herbs and serve it with chicken. I am sure it will also be good drizzled over vegetables.

So how do you make it? You will need the following:

1. 3 Egg yolks (large)
2. 1/2 fresh lemon – juiced
3. 1/4 cup butter – melted
4. salt and cayenne pepper.

Mixed the yolks, juice, salt and pepper together until smooth. Slowly add the butter and whisk. Microwave for 15 sec at a time (total 30 – 45 sec), whisk after each session to ensure no lumps. You can find our adapted recipe here.

I prefer my sauce thick and lemony, so if you feel the lemon is to much you can gladly reduce it to your liking. That’s the magic about recipes – change it to how you prefer it. We made a double batch and eat it all. Hubby was surprise at the bright yellow colour as opposed to the pale yellow he knows from restaurants. Makes you think about what they actually use to make their sauce.

With the left over egg whites – I made breakfast this morning. Scrambled eggs with spinach, but you can also make cloud bread/oopsie break (Recipes).

So why not give it a go and let us know what you think. I am sure we can come up with some amazing food combinations.