Easy Hollandaise Sauce - Blender VS Classic - Food Science!

today on passion for food we're getting a little saucy and talking all about one of the classics hollandaise sauce it's considered one of the five mother sauces but boy does it have a mother of a reputation for being difficult to make but is that reputation ready for refutation let's find out as I dawn my culinary mythbuster hat for this episode testing out not only blender versus classic preparations but also less traditional methods that might prove to be even easier so let's not waste a split second let's go ahead and get cracking here with four large eggs and you know from all of the yolk separation techniques I've tried over the years really I like the classic double shell juggling I really think that one just works the best the main reason being the edges of the egg shell here are actually quite sharp and it'll help us cut through that eggy membrane just a little bit quicker so we want to simply go ahead and separate out all four yolks and as for the egg whites we definitely want to keep those I'm just gonna throw them in a bag and freeze them but now that we're done yoking around let's go ahead and begin the classic hollandaise preparation by putting a metal bowl over a double boiler I'm going to be using a pretty classic combination here and I'm gonna keep this consistent over all of the tests that we do so in addition to our four egg yolks we have one tablespoon of fresh squeezed lemon juice about half a teaspoon of salt and about a quarter of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper so we just want to start whisking this vigorously as our double boiler comes up to temperature it really works best with slow even heat so once the double boiler starts to actually boil it's a good idea to cut the temperature down to low so we just have a gentle steaming going on so we're just gonna continue to beat these eggs as we heat them and you'll notice as you do that they start to change color and increase in volume a bit once we see that characteristic lightening in color and it thickens a little we can start to add half a cup of butter we're gonna drizzle this in slowly we want to continue whisking vigorously to get that butter broken up into droplets and emulsified in with the eggs so we just want to continue drizzling in and whipping drizzling in and whipping until we've used our entire four ounces of butter and I am using salted butter here if you use unsalted butter you want to add about another teaspoon or so of salt anyway once we get our final drizzle of melted butter in there we just want to continue whisking this vigorously over our double boiler until it thickens to the consistency that we're looking for ultimately what that is is up to you it's ready to serve right now but the longer we continue to whisk this over the heat the thicker it's going to get but just keep in mind the main place I see people running into trouble with hollandaise is actually overcooking it you can wind up scrambling the eggs and you'll definitely wind up with a broken sauce and a broken heart that way if yours winds up getting a little too thick just whisk in a tablespoon of water at a time until you get it back to the consistency you want for me this is about perfect it's nice and thick but it's still super silky when you pour off a spoon you should definitely see a stream and not droplets and it should be able to coat the back of a spoon easily so we want to go ahead and give this a quick taste for seasoning and if it needs a little extra salt this is the time but go ahead and serve this immediately over some eggs Canadian bacon and a split toasted English muffin gives us the classic Eggs Benedict that really is a beautiful sauce so wait we're done right well hang on now I've always been kind of a skeptical guy and I'm a little frizzled by the drizzle like it's all that slow drizzling and gradual beating of the eggs actually necessary let's explore a couple of other options here and see how those sauces turn out and just like before we're gonna whisk our egg yolks and other ingredients over our double boiler until it lightens and thickens just slightly in color and then we're gonna throw in cold butter straight from the fridge yes that's cold butter I always have been kind of a cool guy and at first I was gonna put the butter in in three batches but after thinking about it for a minute I decided hey let's just throw it all in there and we're basically done we just want to continue whisking and mixing this over the double boiler until all the butter is melted and then the hollandaise thickens up to the consistency that we're looking for again cook it a little longer if you want it to be thicker I left this one a little thinner than the last one but it is still a beautiful hollandaise so apparently the need to slowly drizzle in your butter amounts to just so much culinary hogwash although I guess you could argue that the cold butter melting in slowly with the eggs is still kind of a slow drizzle of butter so let's test out one more scenario I haven't seen anyone else do it this way I'm calling it the double boiler catastrophe and this is meant to be worst-case scenario we're just gonna throw everything including our melted butter into the double boiler no whipping the eggs no nothing now just like any licensed culinary instructor will tell you this is just terrible this will never work you cannot achieve a stable emulsion simply by throwing all of that fat in there and beginning to whisk it those little fat droplets will not be able to distribute evenly through well sacre bleu that appears to have worked just fine and to understand why let's take a moment and talk about the science behind the egg-cellent properties eggs have four emulsification there are several different proteins and eggs that aid with emulsification but the main thing we're gonna talk about is lectin and this is found primarily in the egg yolks the important thing about this particular protein is it has one end that's hydrophobic and one and that's hydrophilic meaning one end is attracted to water and the other end is repulsed by water which makes them extremely versatile emulsifiers something on the left there would represent an egg custard that's mostly water with a little fat and something on the right would represent something like a on days or mayonnaise that's mostly fat with a little bit of water that is the magic of lectin so now that we're thick as thieves from that emulsification explanation you know the drill we're just going to continue whisking and cooking this until it's the consistency that we're looking for and not to keep beating on about this but you do want to get cracking and serve this excellent sauce immediately and as we can see even though this holidays was made completely the wrong way it came out oh so right but now that we know a little more about the magic of emulsification let's see what other kind of shenanigans we can get away with so I'm gonna go ahead and prepare two different blender versions and compare that hollandaise to the more traditional double boiler methods and we're just going to throw everything except for the melted butter in there and give it a spin on high for about one minute you'll see the color lighten up a little bit at which point we want to drizzle in our butter but this time the butter needs to be very hot basically as hot as you can get it before it starts to brown supposedly that will be enough to cook our eggs I'm a little bit dubious about that but I do think it helps the sauce thicken up for us so we're just gonna continue to blend on a high for a minute or two until it's nice and thick the longer we blend this the thicker it's gonna get but this is about perfect for me but what about the eggs in there are those actually cooked you know I've had people assure me that through a combination of the heat from that hot butter and the heat produced from the friction of the blender that that's gonna be plenty to cook those eggs but I found my skepticism flaring once more so let's do one final test to actually see if that's true or not but I didn't really feel like it would be a fair test using that blender because it appeared to be held together mostly with plastic rubber bands and a little bit of hope so I thought I would use my armored ssin blender which is made out of slightly sterner stuff and definitely produces quite a bit more heat friction as it operates so just like before we're going to throw everything except for the melted utter in here and give it a blend until it starts to lighten up and thicken slightly once it roughly doubles in volume we're gonna go ahead and drizzle in our 1/2 cup of hot butter now we might be able to get away with dumping all of that butter in at once I was just a little concerned that with how hot it was it might scald part of the eggs but I didn't test that part so if you ever do get around to testing that definitely leave a comment and let me know what happens anyway once we have all of our butter in there we just want to continue blending until it's nice and thick and you can see how hot that butter was it's actually steaming up that glass a bit I wanted to give this a fair chance of working so I continue to blend until it was about the maximum thickness that I like the immersion blender itself was hot but are these eggs cooked well let's have a quick look with our instant-read thermometer and find out and I was getting readings in the mid 90s so no I would not really consider those eggs cooked but hey you know what neither are the eggs in mayonnaise so I'm not terribly concerned about that I did wind up doing another test off-camera where I blended it even more aggressively and I did manage to break a hundred but even then it was like 105 or so which is still not cooked technically speaking so if you are at all concerned about getting a raw deal you might be better off sticking to the double boiler methods but hey I like to eat my yolks runny all the time so I obviously just love to live dangerously so let's go ahead and plate up some of our easy blender hollandaise sauce and I have to say even though this came out of a blender instead of the traditional double boiler the texture and flavors were spot on which leads me to believe that the cooking of the egg is actually not as critical to this as is the general emulsification principles and getting air beaten into the sauce in fact I'll go even further and suggest that it's actually the cooking or rather overcooking of the eggs that get people into trouble and have them thinking oh this is such a difficult because if you cook the eggs beyond say a hundred and forty degrees they're going to begin to coagulate and you're just gonna wind up with a mess the blender methods are definitely more foolproof but now thanks to me you know that they're not actually fully cooking those eggs whoops sorry about that anyway I hope you've enjoyed today's episode of passion for food if you have give me a thumbs up below and consider subscribing and hitting that little bell so you don't miss our future episodes this has been Graham with passion for food [Music] [Music]

Channel: Passion for food

Views: 68,471

Keywords: hollandaise sauce, eggs benedict, blender hollandaise sauce, hollandaise sauce blender, easy hollandaise sauce, classic hollandaise sauce, traditional holla, traditional hollandaise sauce, cooking, food, easy sauce, passion for food

Id: N0LMPEVyRn0

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020