Béarnaise Sauce

Alongside peppercorn, this is the best sauce you can have with a steak. Remove the tarragon, and you've got one of the five French mother sauces.

Ingredients

• 6 large egg yolks
• 1 block of salted butter
• 150g fresh tarragon
• 2 banana shallots
• 100ml white wine vinegar
• 1/2tsp of coarse ground pepper

Method

1. Finely dice the shallots
2. Finely chop the tarragon
3. Add the vinegar, shallots, pepper and 100g of the tarragon to a pan and simmer
4. After 5 minutes, take off the heat and drain the vinegar mixture
5. Add the butter to a pan and melt completely (don't worry about clarifying it)
6. In a bowl, whisk the yolks to an emulsion
7. Add the vinegar mixture to the emulsion and continue to whisk
8. Slowly and steadily add the tarragon vinegar to the emulsion, continue whisking
9. Once both mixtures are combined, add the remaining 50g of fresh tarragon and the sauce is done

Notes

If the mixture isn't thickening up enough, you can continue to whisk the sauce over pan of hot water (be careful not scramble the eggs, though).

If the sauce splits or breaks, you can rescue it with a few teaspoons of boiling water. If that fails you can try whisking a broken sauce into a fresh egg yolk to rescue.

Inspiration

Thanks to Ben Davy for the original recipe.