All Hail the Hollandaise of Beef

Who could say no to the Hollandaise sauce for Steak?! Yes, Bernaise is a sister to our egg-stra special friend Hollandaise, both made with whisked egg yolk and clarified butter. Bernaise, however, adds a savory mix of vinegar, shallots, tarragon, and chervil (a pretty little spice I hadn’t heard of prior to my first attempt cooking up this sauce) and forgoes the lemon found in Hollandaise. As you may or may not be able to see in the photo, I added chopped up baby bellas to my bernaise. It added a nice, complementary flavor and allowed me to feel like I was eating “more healthy” (despite the beef and bernaise, of course).

More after the jump…

I used a couple of different recipes, which mostly differed in amount of each ingredient. Some don’t call for the Chervil, but I chose to throw it in my sauce anyway. Since I didn’t make up my own recipe, I’ll let you read the one I followed most closely. There are a buzillion others on Google. If you ask me, the real trick is in the elbow grease! Get ready to whisk for a while.

Just a bit of advice, a sieve and double-boiler will make your life much easier as you attempt to create this sauce. It’s a lot harder to clarify butter (which basically entails heating up the butter until it separates and then removing the milk solids that float to the top) and to strain the vinegar/tarragon/chervil/shallot mix without a sieve, though both are do-able. Also, if you don’t have a double-boiler, it will mean whisking the egg yolks in a small saucepan over a larger pot of hot/steaming water.

In the end, I grilled a London Broil to a medium rare, sliced it up, laid it on a bed of mashed potatoes and poured the mushroom Bernaise sauce on top. ***Actually, lest Gansie call me out on this, I didn’t have a potato masher and so I whipped these potatoes up in a Cuisinart. It made for more of a potato paste than a mash, tasty but different.***

Mmmm…