Easy Hollandaise Sauce Recipe

by | Mar 11, 2012 | Quick and Easy Recipe, Sauces | 3 comments

Easy Hollandaise Sauce Recipe

Prep time: 5 min
Serves: 2

A stack of muffin, bacon and poached egg topped with a thick creamy hollandaise sauce has to be the ultimate in decadent breakfasting! For years I’ve put off making a hollandaise sauce because an easy hollandaise sauce recipe completely alluded me.  Finally, having recently mastered the humble poached egg, I decided to grow a pair and master a hollandaise sauce recipe. To my delight, whilst researching various hollandaise sauce recipes, I found an article by Felicity Cloake who had already done all of the research for me! Felicity had investigated and experimented with hollandaise sauce recipes from a variety of renowned chef’s and ended up with this amazingly easy hollandaise sauce recipe! If you want to read the article itself, take a look here, it really is very comprehensive.

This easy hollandaise sauce recipe comes from the kitchen of Harold Mcgee. So without further ado, here it is – Harold Mcgee’s easy hollandaise sauce recipe!

Ingredients for Easy Hollandaise Sauce

  • 1 Egg Yolk
  • 65g unsalted butter
  • 1 dessert spoon of water
  • 1 tsp lemon juice

How to make Easy Hollandaise Sauce

  1. Put a pan on the lowest heat possible
  2. Cut the butter up into cubes and add to a small saucepan with the water
  3. Add the yolk to the pan and start whisking
  4. Once the butter has melted, turn the heat up slightly and continue to whisk until the sauce has reached the desired consistency.
  5. Add lemon juice, whisk a bit more and serve.
  6. Yum !!

Easy Hollandaise Sauce Notes & Tips:

  • At no point should you stop whisking the hollandaise sauce – this is vital!
  • If the hollandaise sauce get’s too hot during cooking, just remove the pan from the heat and continue whisking
  • You could try adding a teaspoon of white wine vinegar instead of or as well as the lemon juice
  • Garnish with some chives or parsley
I feel that it’s important to share that by using this easy hollandaise sauce recipe, I’ve copped out somewhat. If you want to see how to make a REAL hollandaise sauce you can watch the video below – I will attempt this soon, however, it’s a lot of messing about and creates a huge pile of washing up! I hope you enjoyed this recipe:-

 

3 Comments

  1. Sarah on May 8, 2013 at 8:07 pm

    This has to be the WORST recipe ever. Sauce perfect consistency, I added the lemon juice and the whole thing curdled, I had to throw it away. Massive fail.

  2. adira on September 17, 2013 at 2:26 pm

    Hi Sarah,

    Many thanks for your feedback – I will pass your comments on to Harold McGee :-). On a serious note, it is far more likely that your sauce simply got too hot – this is generally why it appears to curdle. You can actually recover from this by adding another egg yolk and whisking like mad!

    Hope this helps
    Phill

  3. Pauline on July 19, 2016 at 7:38 pm

    I found this recipe easy, no problems, used my magic whisk and the side of the rayburn, not the actual flat plate, it was foamy and smooth will definitely do again

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