Smoked Haddock Omelette
And putting my body on the line in the pursuit of the perfect hollandaise recipe
Welcome to another issue of Le Cordon Bong, a newsletter about recreating Michelin star meals at home. You can get in touch with me via the comments or by email. All of the previous content is up on the website (which I personally find to be a a more enjoyable reading experience than the email format).
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Week 6, vol. 1
Setting the Table
Welcome new readers!
I *think* I’ve narrowed down the next cookbook for this newsletter to two choices - Rogan, by Simon Rogan, and The French Laundry, by Thomas Keller. Unlike some of the other Michelin restaurant cookbooks on my bookshelf, they actually contain recipes for adult-sized portions, and the ingredients are mostly obtainable.
Well, semi-obtainable in Rogan’s case, unless you’re prepared to do some foraging, and/or happen to have opened your own farm to cultivate rare varietals of fruit and vegetables. But we’ll make it work.
If you’ve been here before, skip ahead! For the benefit of first-time readers, cookbook recipe write-ups are structured as follows: (1) Amuse-bouche - the history and provenance of the dish; (2) Starters - an intro to the fancy Michelin version of the dish I’ll be cooking; (3) Main courses - the actual cooking process; (4) Desserts - thoughts and conclusions on what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what tasted good; (5) Petit Fours - footnotes and references.
Amuse-Bouche
The dish in focus this week is Tom Kerridge’s signature smoked haddock omelette, a riff on an omelette Arnold Bennett - created at The Savoy Hotel by Jean Baptiste Virlogeux in 1929 for the famed English novelist. The key elements of this omelette are smoked fish, cheese, sauce (hollandaise, bechamel, or both), and obviously, eggs.
We’re going to shake things up a bit this week and take a deep dive into just one of the components - hollandaise sauce - after a reader asked if I had a foolproof recipe akin to the 2 minute mayo I shared previously.
Despite the name, it’s unclear exactly where hollandaise comes from. As usual, theories abound1. The earliest known documented recipe is French, from 1651 in La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François. It was later known as sauce Isigny (after Isigny-sur-Mer, renowned for its excellent butter) in the 19th century, before finally being codified as sauce hollandaise, one of the five French mother sauces classified in 1903 by Auguste Escoffier in his seminal work, Le Guide Culinaire.
Starters
So, what exactly is hollandaise sauce, and how do we make it?
Hollandaise is an oil-in-water emulsion that binds together with the help of egg yolks, more precisely, the lecithin2 in egg yolks. Oil and water don’t like to mix, but lecithin molecules have one end that sticks to oil, and one end that sticks to water - voilà, an emulsion.
Coagulation of egg proteins likely plays a role as well (a soft boiled egg yolk is thicker than a raw one), as studied in the 2014 paper, ‘Preparation methods influence gastronomical outcome of hollandaise sauce’.
Thus, the two key processes are (1) heat - which stops the butter from solidifying and helps to coagulate the egg yolk proteins so everything can mix together (also, warm food is nice); and (2) whisking / stirring - which breaks up the clumps of fat, water and lecithin so they can bind to one another.
Main Courses
With all that in mind, I set out to collect and test as many hollandaise recipes as reasonably possible.
There were some fun moments along the way. The French Laundry cookbook contains a full page soliloquy about the magic of hollandaise for Thomas Keller as a young chef and how he spent two years perfecting it when he worked at the yacht club, and then… doesn’t actually give you a recipe for hollandaise3. Thanks, Tom!
Julia Child recommends her recipe for Hollandaise Sauce made in the Electric Liquidizer comes “as the technique is well within the capabilities of an 8-year-old child”. Which I mean, sure, if you’re fine with your 8-year-old heating foaming hot butter on the stove and playing with electric blenders.
I returned with a list of 12 recipes, categorised as follows:
Bain-marie4 (melted butter): (1) Escoffier, (2) Larousse, (3) Tom Kerridge, (4) Spruce Eats, (5) Eric Ripert,
Bain-marie (cold butter): (6) Leiths, (7) Delia Smith (these recipes likely have a shared origin, but I haven’t been able to track it down)
Direct heat (melted butter): (8) Julia Child
Direct heat (cold butter): (9) Harold McGee
Blender (melted butter): (10) Serious Eats / The Food Lab, (11) Julia Child, (12) Josh Emett
Given my preference to avoid hollandaise-induced heart disease, I decided to cook one recipe from each category, as opposed to all twelve (although in hindsight, cooking all twelve would probably have propelled me to the front of the Covid vaccination queue).
(1) Julia Child (Traditional) - Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1
Julia’s recipe starts by heating yolks, water, lemon juice, and salt over direct heat (a surprisingly risky choice), then adds cold butter to stop them from overcooking, which I thought was a good idea.
Everything went well, until it came to taking the sauce off the heat, and whisking in the melted butter. I had hollandaise, but it was a very frigid morning in my kitchen, and the sauce got cold and stiffened very quickly. I’m not the only person who’s had this problem with Julia’s recipe.
The classic method. Heat yolks and water in a bain-marie until it reaches the ‘ribbon’ texture, then drizzle and whisk in melted butter. My bowl was slightly too big for the saucepan which made it wobble when whisking, but otherwise, no complaints whatsoever. It produced beautiful, silky sauce.
For some reason, I used to think this was difficult, but all you need is a bit of patience to avoid scrambling the eggs.
I liked that the bain-marie kept everything warm, which meant I could take my time to adjust the seasoning, toast a muffin, poach a couple of eggs, and assemble some Eggs Benedict.
(3) Harold McGee - On Food and Cooking: The Science and the Lore of the Kitchen
McGee (who, by the way, is excellent on CBS’ Mind of a Chef, which I highly recommend) tosses all conventions out of the window and chucks the yolks, butter, water, lemon juice and salt straight in the pan and just whisks until the sauce comes together.
I expected this to end in tears, but to my amazement, it worked! The emulsion felt a little weaker, and it doesn’t incorporate quite as much butter - 65g of butter per yolk vs 80-100g for the traditional methods. The texture was fluffier than the Larousse sauce, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
I used this sauce for the smoked haddock omelette.
(4) Serious Eats (Immersion Blender)
This recipe has been my go-to for the last few years, as it’s quick and easy - melt some butter, trickle it into a cup, and blend it all up.
To be honest, though, I think I’ll be abandoning this method going forward. It relies on using the heat of the melted butter to cook the eggs which can cause a few issues:
You need to pour the butter in fast enough that you don’t lose the heat, but not so fast that the sauce splits. I’m fine with that, but it can be frustrating for beginners. Additionally, the sauce doesn’t really thicken until you’re halfway through the butter (it takes time to heat up the yolks), so you’re flying blind and trusting the sauce will eventually form - another challenge for beginners.
There’s limited heat control, which means the texture of the sauce can potentially be inconsistent from batch to batch.
Like other non-bain-marie methods, you have to transfer to a warm place if not using immediately, which defeats the convenience of the blender method.
(5) Hybrid Method
At this point, I was going to try the Leith’s / Delia technique of gradually adding solid butter over a bain-marie, but a brainwave occurred - why not just add all the solid butter at once, but do it over a bain-marie? Combine the best of both worlds - the convenience of the McGee all-in-one together with the temperature control and heat retention of the traditional method!
I excitedly proposed the idea to a couple of chef friends who promptly informed me that umm, that’s exactly how they’ve been cooking brunch service for years5, usually with a splash of cream to stabilise the sauce. It works great in restaurant kitchens because it’s much easier to cook up a 60-yolk batch without having to slowly drizzle and whisk in melted butter.
With my short-lived daydreams of chef superstardom dashed, I begrudgingly proceeded to whip up yet another batch of hollandaise.
It worked amazingly well. Throw everything together, whisk at a moderate speed for 6-7 minutes as it heats gently, and before you know it, you’ve got some really good hollandaise with only one bowl to clean.
Desserts
To compare all five recipes, I’ve devised the highly scientific Le Cordon Bong Hollandaise Rating System, and spoiler alert if you haven’t figured it out already: S̶n̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶k̶i̶l̶l̶s̶ ̶D̶u̶m̶b̶l̶e̶d̶o̶r̶e̶ the hybrid method wins.
That said, I still really like the traditional recipe, which yields the strongest emulsion and allows the most butter to be incorporated (more butter is always a good thing).
Julia Child - Marks deducted for needing to transfer the sauce to stay warm. Takes some unnecessary risks - cooking directly on stovetop, and stirring in the butter as the sauce cools.
Larousse - The classic remains tried and tested.
McGee - A great recipe, but doesn’t incorporate as much butter, and offers less control over the emulsion due to cooking directly on the stovetop.
Serious Eats - It’s fast, but not faster than McGee or the Hybrid, and requires extra cleaning up to keep warm. The blender results in a very smooth sauce, but it can be hard to hit the right thickness every time.
Hybrid - Combines the best of old and new. It’s one of the fastest methods, has the least clean-up, scales up regardless of whether you’re using one egg yolk or 60, and won’t result in scrambled egg because the cold butter stops the temperature from rising quickly.
In a temporary departure from this newsletter’s regular format, instead of the smoked haddock omelette, I’ll be sharing my recipe for No Fuss Eggs Benedict6 later this week. Until then, happy cooking!
Addendum: During the course of my recipe testing this week, I have had a number of people on social media patronisingly mansplain to me *exactly* how to make hollandaise, including one who suggested I check out a video of the exact technique that I had just demonstrated. Thank you for your input.
P.S. If your “foolproof hollandaise recipe” has way more egg yolk than butter, you’ve been making custard, not hollandaise.
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
The general consensus is that hollandaise sauce is French in origin, despite the name. One theory posits that the name comes from a recipe that the French Huguenots brought back from their exile in Holland. Another posits that the sauce was renamed after imported Dutch butter after WWI shuttered Normandy’s dairy industry (almost impossible, given that Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire was published in 1903, a good decade before the war).
Lastly, my preferred explanation is that in the 1800s, chefs simply named sauces after whatever they wanted, just like how sauce Africaine, Allemande, and Espagnole have nothing to do with Africa, Germany, and Spain. Although with sauce Espagnole, there is an alternative theory that… alright, alright, that’s a story for another time.
The lecithin in egg yolks is similar to soy lecithin, which you’ll commonly see as an emulsifier on the ingredients list of packaged food.
There’s also a paragraph on how great béarnaise is, and again, there is no recipe.
A bain-marie, also known as a double boiler, is simply a bowl or pan set atop another pan of hot water, instead of direct heat. This cooks more gently and prevents extreme temperature changes in the cooking vessel.
Upon further investigation, the hybrid method appears to be an open secret amongst chefs, yet somehow does not appear in the first 40 search results for hollandaise recipes on Google (I checked).
Okay, it’s more like Optional Fuss Eggs Benedict because you can make the English muffins from scratch if you really want to.