Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Hollandaise is one of the most temperamental of all French sauces. Many cooks have tried to make hollandaise—tried and failed, cursing the heavens as they stare at a bunch of greasy <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/precision-scrambled-eggs">scrambled eggs</a> instead of creamy, hot mayonnaise. Over the years, we’ve come up with different methods to get from raw eggs, acid, and butter to a beautiful hollandaise—<a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/an-instant-way-to-an-even-better-hollandaise">using a blender</a>, <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/foolproof-sous-vide-eggs-benedict">using sous vide</a>, <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/bright-fluffy-whipped-hollandaise">and even a whipping siphon</a>. This one might just be the best yet, and it also happens to be the easiest we’ve ever used. The key? Precise temperature control, on your stovetop. Classic techniques for making hollandaise rely on gentle heating of the egg yolks and acid using a double boiler, which limits how hot the mixture can get because <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/guides-tools/should-you-steam-it-or-boil-it-the-difference-matters">steam</a> won’t exceed [f 212] at normal atmospheric pressure. Even with that approximate temperature regulation, each method requires the cook to understand and respond to visual and other sensory cues to produce a silky sauce—and not a curdled mess. But if you can precisely control the temperature of the saucepan so it sits at [f 185], you can literally just dump all the ingredients in there, stir, and watch as the emulsion forms and thickens, transforming from a runny liquid into a rich, spoon-coating sauce. When you dial in the pan temperature, the process is dead simple, which frees you up to notice elements of it that you&#39;d otherwise be too harried or stressed to appreciate, like the phase change that occurs as the emulsion slowly forms and thickens. Do it several times, and you’ll find that even the fussiest of classic hollandaise techniques won’t be intimidating at all. You’ll have a solid reference point for the exact texture you want to achieve, and you’ll have the experience of watching, as if in slow motion, the sauce form. Put simply, you’ll understand the nuances of regulating temperature control when dealing with temperature-sensitive emulsions.

Precision Hollandaise