Veganizing Classic Sauces – Hollandaise
Does the world need a vegan version of hollandaise sauce – the answer is yes when you realize how simple it is to create a sauce worthy of licking the plate.
This is part V of my multi-part series on how I veganized five classical French sauces. I previously explored Vegan Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole (brown), and Tomato Sauces – all essential sauces to learn if you want to expand your recipe archive and bring a little extra to your vegan food. The fifth, and final sauce, is Hollandaise – a classical emulsion of egg yolks and butter, and indeed a sauce that appears difficult to veganize based on the ingredients used to create the original sauce. Difficult, but not impossible…and even simple as my method demonstrates.
When I first thought of writing a series on how I veganized classical sauces, I immediately wondered if veganizing Hollandaise sauce was worth it. Maybe it was a step too far? Does the world need a vegan version of Hollandaise sauce?
I eventually decided to give it a go – but more from a curious chef's perspective than developing something useful for the home cook. It became more of a personal challenge – a culinary tracking device to see where I was as a vegan chef.
My early attempts failed, of course, but that only encouraged me until I finally got it right. And now, I can say, “yes, the world does need a vegan hollandaise sauce.”
Classical Hollandaise Sauce
Like most of my veganizing efforts, I began my journey by examining what I already knew about the original recipe.
My culinary school notes and my worn Escoffier cookbook told me Hollandaise sauce is made by thickening egg yolks, salt, and a couple of tablespoons of water over modest heat. Once thickened, melted butter is slowly whisked into the egg yolks to create an emulsion delicately flavored with lemon juice and a suggestion of cayenne pepper. The result is a pale-yellow silky-smooth sauce that barely clings to its intended target. The acid from the lemon offsets the fatty nature of hollandaise, and the mouth forgets about all that butter and richness from the egg yolks. It converts bland-tasting poached asparagus into a decadent offering. It covers poached eggs with a velvet blanket made of lemon-infused fat. It somehow makes poached salmon into something other than a piece of cardboard…something regal.
And I hated it. I hated making it in culinary school. I hated eating it at some trendy breakfast café on College Avenue in Berkeley. I even hated eating it in the quaintest Alsatian restaurant during the peak of the asparagus season in May. It was always too much fat for me – even as a confessed cheese addict at that time. Eating anything with Hollandaise sauce was like taking a sleeping pill; I just slipped into a food coma after my digestive tract began working.
Hollandaise sauce is also dangerous – a fact emphasized during culinary school but often minimized and forgotten once I entered the real world of restaurant cooking. And as a Chef, I’m not alone in thinking it’s a dangerous sauce. Here’s what Anthony Bourdain once said about Hollandaise sauce:
“While we’re on brunch, how about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it breaks when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order. Most likely, the stuff on your eggs was made hours ago and held on station. Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, heated, clarified, and strained to get out all the breadcrumbs and cigarette butts. Butter is expensive, you know. Hollandaise is a veritable petri-dish of biohazards.”
Ouch. Fortunately, a vegan version of hollandaise sauce is not subject to this kind of disregard for health.
Making a Vegan Version
I still wondered how I would use a vegan version of hollandaise sauce. Most uses for hollandaise are to coat a piece of fish… to make the famous brunch offering of Eggs Benedict...or to dress asparagus. Was that it? Did I really want to create a sauce with the sole intention of coating asparagus?
My curiosity prevailed, I overcame this next obstacle of resistance, and my journey continued.
My next stop was the internet – a decent place to see what others were doing. It was also an area littered with endless copies of identical recipes that all claim they’ve created some remarkable discovery. In the case of hollandaise sauce, most vegan attempts follow a familiar pattern of using a roux, coloring the sauce with turmeric, and using way too much lemon, mustard, and vinegar (some even added nutritional yeast to add that unique vegan cheese flavor to a sauce that never had cheese). These versions may work as a sauce, but they are not hollandaise from a taste or mouthfeel perspective.
On my next stop, I returned to the ingredients used to create hollandaise. I studied them...and thought, hollandaise is very much the same thing as mayonnaise – just with butter instead of oil. I have no idea why I never made this connection, but there it was...and that’s where I went.
I quickly turned to my fast version of making mayonnaise into mayo and added a bit of starch to create a thickening element and some cayenne pepper to create a subtle tickle in the back of the throat—another failure. The result was too acidic. It bit too hard from the lemon juice, vinegar, and cayenne pepper. And it looked wrong, too – I knew I shouldn’t have added any turmeric.
I finally returned to a place I always eventually revisit when veganizing something – the original recipe. In this case, I thought about the egg yolks and butter – the only two ingredients I needed to replace with something vegan. I know egg yolks are primarily fat and protein, so those were the elements I had to replace. The function of the egg yolk was something else. Sauces thickened with egg yolks work because the coagulation of the proteins thickens them. This meant I had to develop a way of thickening a vegan version into a creamy...and fatty emulsification. The butter question is always simple to deal with. Butter is typically 80-82% fat, so in most cases, oils in those quantities can be used to replace butter in a recipe.
I thought a lot about custard and how I solved that problem, so it made sense to me to begin thinking about combining silken tofu, soy milk, and a starch binder to replace the egg. I opted for a neutral-tasting unrefined oil – sunflower oil – as my butter substitute. I blended all the ingredients with an immersion blender – precisely as I did in making my mayo recipe. Once combined, I put everything into a saucepan and gently heated the sauce to a temperature of roughly 60°C (160°F) – just enough to activate my starch and get that thickening bit happening.
I was surprised when I tasted the result. It tasted exactly like hollandaise sauce. It looked the same with that pale yellow color. The mouthfeel was the same. The only real difference was that I didn’t need to nap 20 minutes after eating it. And for me, that’s a win.
I tried my new sauce in various ways and served it to my most prominent critic – my wife. First, on steamed potatoes. Then on wilted spinach and grilled mushrooms. Then on gently roasted broccoli. In each case, my wife latterly licked the plate clean. No compliment is more meaningful to a chef than when someone licks the plate clean.
A Final Word
I’ve been writing this newsletter for 14 months, and it’s been a tremendous experience. I’ve met some fantastic readers and writers on this journey. I remain humble and grateful for the opportunity to do the kind of work I want to do in life – namely, teach people about cooking and share my passion with others. I hope I have been able to inspire you to cook healthy vegan food more often. I also want to ask for your help if you can. Developing these newsletters and the recipes I offer for free has a cost – a cost I hope I can offset to some degree through your generous support. Upgrading from a free subscription to a paid one helps me subsidize the considerable costs associated with this newsletter. Paid subscribers get a couple of perks – like accessing recipes in my new Recipe Archive – but I want to continue offering the majority of the content I produce here to remain free to anyone looking to venture more into the world of vegan cooking. I subsidized the first year, and now I’m asking for some support if you can afford to help me with the expenses.