Talk:Hollandaise sauce

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I took this out: World War I disrupted butter production in France, so the sauce's main ingredient had to be imported. Since butter was mainly imported from Holland, the name changed. Geography, history and common sense combine to say "no." Cooking history is full of these inventions: see Mayonnaise. Wetman 02:44, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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Is it altogether certain that Hollandaise is a mix of butter and lemon, using eggs as an emulsifier? I have been told that the lemon juice is acting as an emulsifier to help the granules of egg yolk absorb the butter. Regardless of whether this (fairly chemical) point is true, a number of chefs note that the lemon juice can be replaced with white wine (perhap white wine vinegar, I forget) and/or fish stock. Including Julia Child and the chef for the British royal family.

I'm not altogether familiar with the culinary arts, but I'm fairly certain that eggs are the emulsifier. Emulsifiers stabilize the interface between polar and nonpolar liquids.

In Hollandaise sauce, lemon juice is most water, which is polar. Butter, as a fat composed of aliphatic carboyhydrates, is highly nonpolar. Don't quote me on this, but the yolk proteins can interact with both nonpolar and polar molecules, binding both lemon juice and butter and causing them to dissolve into solution. Hope this helps! Isopropyl 00:45, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Harold Mcgee's On Food and Cooking describes hollandaise and bearnaise sauces as "egg-emulsified butter sauces", "similar to mayonnaise in many respects." He goes on to describe the lemon juice in hollandaise as a flavoring agent, but does point out that - in the hollandaise making methods that cook the egg somewhat (most of them) - the acidity minimizes the risks of the yolks curdling in the heat. As far as I know, lemon juice has no emulsifying properties, but it is interesting to note that butter itself contains enough emulsifiers to bind sauces such as beurre blanc, witout the need of additional emulsifiers like the powerful ones found in egg yolks. The butter article has a pretty good paragraph (in the Storage and Cooking section) on the various butter sauces and what holds them together. (Plug: I wrote it ;-) —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 01:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

In Jacques_Pépin's "The Complete Techniques", his technique #20 is for Hollandaise. It does not even include lemon juice. He defines Hollandaise as a French mother sauce, being an emulsion consisting of 6-7 yolks per pound of butter. His recipe is 4 yolks, 2 sticks butter and two tablespoons of water. Seems like the volume of water (or lemon juice in other recipes) isn't enough to be one of the 'emulsed' ingredients with the butter...67.167.248.128 00:07, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Blenders?

Hollandaise sauce is now almost impossibly easy to make useing a blender to mix all the ingredients together Eds01 04:00, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV?

I'm not sure, but the phrase "would be accounted a low subterfuge." (just before the Derivatives section) sounds totally out of place - and might be POV? I don't quite understand it and hope someone with more culinary experience could take a look at it. Thanks! -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 01:36, 4 February 2007 (UTC)