No tomatoes, please

New Feature yay! So, the point of this Advanced Studies feature is basically to try and make some of the things that people are generally super afraid to try. I’ve already got souffle down, so why not try other crazy things, just for the halibut (get it? hyuk. also, has anyone else realized how awesome halibut is? wtf)?

I’ve never really been afraid to jump in and try stuff (only when it comes to cooking things, that is). Cooking is such a fun thing for me, and I truly enjoy the process of the making so much that I really don’t even think about failing at something. This probably explains why I was making bread at 12, while my mom is afraid to mess with pre-made pie dough. The thing I always tell her, and would tell anyone else who bothered to ask is, you just really have to dive into things. You can’t be afraid to mess something up because it will just become this horrible self-fulfilling prophecy and you will fail. Food is like a horse or a dog or something, it can smell the fear, or, uh, a snake. Believe me, the pie dough is more afraid of you than you are of it. Maybe. Wrong metaphor? So, just watch, look, listen, and jump right in. This stuff is fun, and, seriously, as high-strung as I am, if I don’t get stressed out about some dang sauce, you sure as hell shouldn’t be afraid.

ANYway, anyone who thinks I can’t cook too good (Andy ahem) can suck it, because I have managed to tackle something that many people spend years, nay, decades! Nay, lifetimes! trying to perfect. Just because I messed up one dish when I was half drunk that one time doesn’t make me a bad cook. It makes me a bad drunk cook. And just because I don’t care about cooking Italian crap doesn’t mean I don’t got that French shit, ya hear? I got it. I super got it.

Bearnaise sauce is a variation on the cooked egg-and-butter hollandaise sauce, which is one of the five mother sauces, and also the sauce used if you’ve ever had eggs benedict. Bearnaise is basically hollandaise sauce, but instead of just egg yolks, butter and lemon juice, it is made with a base of reduced vinegar, tarragon, chervil (you’re supposed to put this in, but I could barely find fresh tarragon, so I wasn’t even gonna try to rustle up freakin chervil. I don’t even know what that is, actually) and shallots with fresh chopped tarragon added in at the end. It pretty much exists to be put on steak, and it’s kind of the best thing ever.

I’m not gonna give an exact recipe here, because, let’s be honest, you can readily find about 6 trillion of them if you just google it, but just talk about the technique. I looked in my trusty L’Escoffier book which said something about like, 6 dL of butter or something. I used my handy conversion skills to parse together a recipe for a manageable amount of sauce (less than a gallon), but I’m sure you can find a much less painful recipe somewhere else.

Basically you just boil some vinegar and peppercorns and chopped tarragon and shallot for a while until it reduces by about 2/3. How do you tell that, you ask? Well, I dunno, I boiled it until it seemed like 2/3 less, and my sauce tastes really vinegar-y, so, longer than I boiled mine, I guess.

Then I strained it and basically whisked and whisked it over a pot of simmering water with some egg yolks while adding, bit by bit, what could only be classified as an assload of butter (2+ sticks, to be exact. Maybe an assload. I haven’t seen “Last Tango In Paris”).

So you pretty much whisk and whisk and whisk and whisk some more, while simultaneously making sure the water doesn’t get too hot so that the eggs don’t cook too much and the sauce separates. I was also simultaneously trying to pan-fry a steak while burning down the kitchen because flat top stoves suck balls and do not cool down quickly at all and ruin your entire life forever and the smoke detector is going off and the maintenance guy is banging on the door and the yappy little dog is flipping her shit, and you have to throw her in the bedroom and let the maintenance guy in to fix the blinds and he laughs at you because you’re burning the apartment down and also trying to whisk your damn sauce. Not a recommended technique.

So you throw the butter in one chunk at a time, and stir and stir until it melts fully, and throw another chunk in, but as the sauce starts to come together, you can put like, 3 or 4 in at a time. But make sure that each time you put some in, you let it melt fully before putting more in. Otherwise, it’s very easy to stray into egg-chunks-and-oily-butter territory.

So, after all that stirring, you just throw in some chopped tarragon to liven it up and put it on some steak, eggs benedict, shoe leather, pretty much anything that you wouldn’t otherwise ever want to eat but is made wonderfully palatable by emulsified butter. Mmmm…..