Saturday, August 29, 2015

Help with an original Hollandaise-inspired sauce recipe?

I make a variation of Hollandaise sauce pretty regularly, goes nice with a lot of things. I was thinking that pretty much the "trick" of Hollandaise sauce is mixing two ingredients that taste good together, lemon and dairy, but don't normally blend, using egg yolk as an emulsion.

So I thought about trying other sauces using egg yolk as an emulsion. Here are the ingredients I used this time. I eyeballed portions so they are guesses:

  • 10g butter melted in about 1/2 cup of milk
  • A handful of shredded cheese, similar in flavor to emmental
  • Crushed white peppercorns
  • 2 small egg yolks
  • 1tsp of Wasabi
  • Apple cider vinegar (not sure how much, maybe two splashes)
  • Salt
  • Juice from pan-fried steak

I started by trying to melt the cheese in the butter and milk at minimum heat. But as soon as I did, it began to clump up / curdle. Afterward, I read about cheese sauces and now I am thinking, should I have thickened the milk and butter with flour before this point? But I don't know if this would have made the next part more difficult.

I then beat the egg yolks together with the vinegar, pepper, and wasabi. I slowly blended it into the dairy portion on the stove. At this point, there were already curdles from just trying to melt the cheese.

However, I wonder if my emulsion idea failed regardless of the melting cheese failing. I had a taste and felt like it was a little bland, so I added more vinegar and the steak's juice. Is there a way to know what the limit is on the amount of acid you can add per yolk (or per amount of milk)? I might have put too much.

I served it on pan-friend steak, maitake mushrooms, and french fries with salt and rosemary. I am happy with the flavor, just not the the appearance and texture. The clumps appeared to just be normal curds, with a mild taste like paneer. Tips for next time to help keep it smoother and more together?

The result



bon appetit

No comments:

Post a Comment