How-To Video: Asparagus with Easy Hollandaise Sauce
By: Sheri Wetherell
Published: March 5, 2013

Asparagus with Hollandaise Sauce is a great classic (and also a kid-friendly recipe!). Watch the video below to learn how to make Chef White's foolproof hollandaise sauce recipe.


Easy Hollandaise Sauce
4 egg yolks
	3 1/2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
Knorr Aromat Seasoning
	1 cup clarified butter
Click here for the instructions and a printable version.
Asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, one of those great classics, not many people do it at home because it’s difficult to make Hollandaise sauce, or they thought it was.  What I’m going to show you today is a fool proof way of making Hollandaise sauce.  The classical way is where you whisk your eggs to a sabayon and then you drip in your butter very slowly and if you do it too quickly, it splits, it curdles and that’s why people just don’t do it.  So what do we need for that?  Aromatics for the seasoning, white wine vinegar, egg yolks and clarified butter.  Clarified butter is where you take butter and you melt it and you separate the butter from the fat, it’s as simple as that.  So, how do we do it?  So, very simple, four egg yolks, 50 to 75 ml of vinegar and 400 ml of clarified butter, so we just add it together and we take some Aromat.  I’ve used it for 30 years, I used it as a boy at the Box Street for seasoning the Hollandaise, for seasoning fish.  It’s basically salt but with lots more flavour.  So then what we do, in a bowl and then we just keep on whisking until it cooks.  As you can see I’m using a deep pan so the bowl is not touching the water and the water’s boiling and all I’m doing is working this until it cooks.  Now you people will be fascinated that this is Hollandaise sauce because they’re used to is that conventional way, that classical way of dripping in the butter which they’re scared of because it splits, so this is a fool proof way of making Hollandaise.  As you can see it’s starting to trail now.  So there’s our Hollandaise sauce with the asparagus.  We’ll just leave that somewhere warm.  One thing about English asparagus, it’s delicious.  It’s not as chunky as some of the stuff from France but its pencil and something like that, no need to peel it because it’s so fine anyway and secondly it’ll only take two minutes to cook.  So that’s why I made the Hollandaise sauce first.  Vegetable stockpot and that’s our seasoning.  Splash of olive oil in there, okay and just whisk in the stockpot, bring that to the boil, take the English asparagus, top to tail, beat it rapidly to the boil and cook for two to three minutes.  Some people refresh their asparagus but by refreshing it you take something away from it and then they reheat it.  So there we are, there’s the fresh asparagus.  And a little salt just to finish off and there we have our asparagus with a sauce Hollandaise.  Very simple, very classical, very delicious.