Why Your Hollandaise Keeps Breaking (and How to Fix It Every Time)

Hollandaise is an emulsion: tiny droplets of fat (clarified butter) suspended in a water-based medium (egg yolk and lemon) held together by lecithin, a naturally occurring emulsifier found in egg yolks. Break that suspension -- by adding butter too quickly, getting it too hot or letting the sauce sit too long -- and the fat separates into greasy puddles floating on a yellow water. It looks disastrous and has happened to every cook, including chefs who have been making the sauce for twenty years.

The three most common causes of a broken hollandaise are: butter added too fast before the previous addition has emulsified (the yolk cannot absorb it quickly enough); sauce overheated above 68 C (the yolk proteins denature and coagulate, releasing the emulsion); or the butter was not warm enough when added (cold fat won't emulsify with a warm base). Fixing the temperature by working over a bain-marie gives you control. The water in the lower pan should be at a gentle simmer -- if it is boiling hard and steaming aggressively, your sauce is heading toward scrambled eggs.

If your hollandaise does break, you have four options in order of urgency. First: add 1 teaspoon of cold water and whisk vigorously off the heat -- this sometimes re-emulsifies a slightly broken sauce. Second: start fresh yolks in a clean bowl, whisk them to the ribbon stage, then slowly drizzle in the broken sauce as though it were your butter -- the new yolks re-absorb the broken emulsion. Third: strain the broken sauce through a fine sieve, reserving the clear butter, and use it like regular clarified butter over new yolks. Fourth: accept it and make a very good bearnaise variation with a generous handful of tarragon, because reduced red wine vinegar and shallots will mask many sins.