Greatest Recipes Ever: Nico Ladenis’s hollandaise sauce

Rose Prince chooses Nico Ladenis’s hollandaise sauce as one of her greatest recipes ever

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Hollandaise sauce

‘No more excuses about the difficulty of Hollandaise. Nico Ladenis's whipping technique makes a pretty much fail-safe, gorgeously airy sauce to eat with summer asparagus and the first wild sea trout'

Rose Prince

Sauce hollandaise

Extract from Nico Ladenis' s My Gastronomy

Published by Ebury Press in 1987

To serve 4-6

Ingredients

5ml (1tsp) mignonette pepper 5ml (1tsp) vinegar 4 egg yolks 200g (7oz) butter, melted and very hot Salt Juice of half lemon Cayenne pepper

Hollandaise is a sauce that we prepare in my kitchen twice a day without fail-once for the lunch service and once for dinner. Although hollandaise can be served very successfully with fish (it has a special affinity with steamed turbot), I prefer to use it as a sauce for vegetables or as a glaze for a tartelette filled with a mushroom purée.

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Method

Mix together the mignonette pepper, vinegar and 45ml (3tbsp) of water. Heat through well, strain through a cloth and tip into the warmed bowl of a mixer. Add the egg yolks and beat thoroughly until they have doubled in size. Tip this into a stainless-steel sabayon bowl.

Bring the hot butter to the boil and tip it slowly onto the frothy egg mass, whisking all the time. By doing this, your hollandaise will be made very quickly and will also be very fluffy. Add salt, lemon juice and cayenne pepper to taste.

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