Making sauces is a tricky culinary discipline. All amateur Chefs have probably had a disaster or two in this area. But fear not – help is here! If a sauce you’ve thickened with flour begins to clump, you can simply strain it through a sieve. If a sauce – such as a hollandaise for asparagus – starts to curdle after you’ve mixed in an egg, the experts have come up with a trick. You can try to mix ice cold water into the sauce and rescue it this way. If this doesn’t help, you might want to consider a really practical solution and mix the curdled sauce with some yoghurt or Quark cheese, for example, to make a dip.
If you fancy having a go at a hollandaise sauce, here’s the recipe: Chop 1 onion, crush a few peppercorns and add both to 100 ml of white wine in a small saucepan, then reduce until there is 1 to 2 tbsp liquid left. Strain the mixture through a sieve. Melt in 250 g butter and allow to boil until clear while continuously skimming off the froth. Beat 2 egg yolks with the chilled wine and onion reduction over a hot water bath until frothy. The mixture must not get too hot, otherwise the egg yolk will curdle. Then gradually add the hot melted butter into the egg-yolk foam. Be careful not to add too much at one time, or else the sauce will turn into scrambled eggs. Add seasoning to taste.
