Béarnaise Sauce Recipe
This Béarnaise sauce recipe goes well with fish, chicken or vegetable but it seems to naturally accompany steak best of all. You'll often get a little dish of homemade béarnaise sauce on the side when you order steak or chicken at a French café, so I thought you'd like to try this elegant version of béarnaise sauce. It's the result of trying a few different recipes and tweaking it to suit my cooking style.
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Making Béarnaise sauce
One thing to remember when making this sauce, is that when adding the egg yolks directly to the vinegar reduction in the saucepan, it's easy to overcook or curdle them. Adding egg yolks directly is the method used in many recipes, but I suggest that you try instead to whisk the egg yolks with a little water separately in a bowl placed over simmering water. This is usually a safer way of making sure your eggs don't curdle.
Another option, as set out below, is to replace melted butter with clarified butter or ghee. Clarified butter has milk solids removed and will generally result in a better emulsion. This has helped me as I can get easily distracted in the kitchen and it's all to easy for the eggs to curdle!
Béarnaise sauce recipe
Ingredients
- 3 large egg yolks
- 100ml (1/3 cup) white wine vinegar
- 2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh shallots (approximately 2 shallots)
- 2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh tarragon (approximately 6 sprigs)
- 100ml (1/3 cup) water
- 200g (71/2oz) clarified butter
Method
- In a medium saucepan, combine the vinegar, shallots and tarragon, bring to the boil and reduce until the vinegar has almost evaporated.
- In a bowl placed over a pan of simmering water, beat the egg yolks with the water until thickened like a light custard.
- Add the reduced vinegar to the egg yolk mixture, then add the butter bit by bit, whisking constantly, while your bowl continues to sit over the pan of simmering water. The texture should be like that of a light mayonnaise.
This is enough sauce for our family, but if you're cooking for a crowd, you may like to double your quantities.
Béarnaise sauce was much loved by the well-known American chef, Julia Child. To read more about her life in France or how you can follow in her footsteps in Paris - read our post 'Julia Child’s Paris - Following in the Steps of America’s French Chef'.
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