Talk:Hollandaise sauce

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Food Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Food and drink, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of food and drink articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

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)

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)
Egg yolks contain large amount of lecithin, if I'm not mistaken, and so they do act as the primary emulsifier in this recipe. Dolohov 17:55, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
–-When you make Hollandaise, the key to keeping the sauce from separating is to use the boiling butter to cook the egg/lemon mixture. See below on using a blender.Caen 04:14, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Lemon juice is not absolutely neccesary to define something as a Hollandaise. Modern definitions classify any sauce made with partially cooked egg yolks and butter as a Hollandaise. The lemon juice is there as an acid to help denature the proteins prior to cooking. In addition, the acid helps raise the coagulation temperature of the proteins which helps the sauce to get hot without turning into scrambled eggs. Some chefs use lemon juice, some white wine, some vinegar. Which one depends on personal preference and the desired use for the sauce. Lemon juice is definitely NOT an emulsifier. The emulsifier in Hollandaise is the lecithin in the egg yolks. Nsoderblom (talk) 19:43, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
I've always found that White Wine Vinegar is the more classical ingredient (as well as tasting better). Lots of Chefs use water - but this is not really part of the recipe. --Tuzapicabit (talk) 22:17, 11 June 2008 (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)

The recipe my mother taught me as a "simplified" method of making Hollandaise involved using a blender to mix the egg yolks, lemon juice, and (in our recipe) cayenne pepper. Boiling-hot butter is then slowly poured into the blender (whilst "blending"). The idea, as explained to me (and, by experiment it holds true,) is that the butter must be hot enough to cook the egg portion of the mixture. My observation is that with the egg/lemon mixture so evenly mixed (which dilutes the concentration of egg/protien,) prior to applying heat, the cooking process acts to thicken the sauce, rather than cook it firm like a cooked egg-yolk.Caen 04:14, 10 May 2007 (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)

I agree that it's on the border, but it's largely true. Specifying "would be accounted by many chefs and food critics a low subterfuge" would satisfy NPOV, in my opinion. Dolohov 17:55, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, but then the article would have weasel words and the line should be changed to "would be accounted by many chefs and food critics a low subterfuge [citation needed]". Actually the whole paragraph reads more like a comment from the writer ("Indeed not."?). Not that the paragraph isn't entertaining or insightful, but it's not very encyclopedic. --217.11.231.68 12:37, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm a chef, and I find comments like that to be very POV and based on those who do not cook for a living. Although opinions on cooking are good, they are not encyclopedic.--Christopher Tanner, CCC 15:36, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization

This article doesn't appear to be consistent it its capitalization of the title word. Should it be capitalized or not? Robert K S (talk) 20:17, 11 March 2008 (UTC)