French cuisine is famous for its sauces, which can transform even the simplest dishes of vegetables, meat, poultry or fish. Bearnaise sauce, or as it is called, bearnez sauce - a popular French cuisine. Its name this sauce shall the king of France, Henry IV, who was born in the south, in Béarn.

History sauce

One of the secrets of the popularity of French cuisine is an abundance of sauces for all occasions. Sharply spicy and creamy soft, sweet and juicy with a slightly sour, with a strong scent or a neutral taste - French cuisine sauces impart a special charm to make the menu varied, and if necessary, ... cooks mask errors.

All these features sauces are widely used in the home kitchen. Any housewife knows that the same dish can literally be transformed depending on what kind of sauce it is served. Also gravy help conceal culinary mistakes - not carefully cut products or, for example, slightly over-dried meat.

The main task of any sauce - to enrich the taste of food, improve, enhance or modify its flavor or texture. Some varieties of sauces served only to some specific dishes, for example, only to duck meat and asparagus. Other sauces are more versatile, they are equally harmoniously with meat and fish, vegetables and pasta.

Sauce bearnez refers rather to the second category. Its bright flavor is perfect for a variety of products. Moreover, named in honor of Henry of Navarre bearnaise sauce - one of the few spices that are equally good both hot and cold.

It is interesting that he, Henry IV, who lived in the XVI-XVII centuries, never tasted the sauce bearnez. This dish was created after the death of the king, in the thirties of the XIX century. The name of the inventor of fragrant spices and remains unknown.

Main ingredients

Bearnez sauce prepared on the basis of eggs, butter and white wine vinegar. The composition includes spicy sauce plants popular in the south of France - shallots, tarragon and chervil. Since these ingredients give the sauce its distinctive taste, they should elaborate.

Shallots resembles ordinary onions with soft shoots and small-sized bulbs. Taste the variety of onions less sharp than the onions, and the flavor is more subtle - not without reason shallots preferred gourmets at all times. In cooking the shallots occasionally replaces the conventional, but it simplifies the taste of food, making it a more primitive and crude.

Estragon (tarragon) - a relative of the ordinary wormwood. This spicy herb is often used to flavor preserves, pickles, meat dishes. Often insist tarragon vinegar or oil. Tarragon is considered an aphrodisiac, because the constant use stimulates the activity of the endocrine glands, including sex. Spicy taste of tarragon is quite sharp, so to speak, for an amateur. Therefore, use this spice should be very careful. If you buy tarragon fails, you can try to replace it with a pinch of dried mint and a few fennel seeds, although equivalent such replacement is difficult to call.

Chervil is a bit like anise aroma and taste - the usual parsley. This spicy greens well with basil and tarragon, and is often used in French cuisine French . Sometimes it is even called the French chervil parsley, moreover, that these plants are similar in appearance. If you buy chervil fails, you can replace it with parsley - the taste is almost the same.

Features cooking

It is advisable to use for cooking sauce only authentic ingredients - just so get a real sauce bearnez. However, if the original version of the bored, you can always experiment with changing sauce aromatic components. For example, instead of tarragon can try to use basil instead of chervil - celery Celery: vegetable with obvious advantages .

Bearnaise sauce preparing no more difficult of his famous brother - mayonnaise sauce. First you need to chop the onion and put it out in the white wine vinegar with the addition of freshly ground pepper. Stew should be almost complete evaporation of the liquid, stirring constantly with a wooden or silicone mixture with a spatula.

The yolks are mixed with salt and butter, pour through a strainer into a mixture of vinegar, which stewed shallots. Further preparation should be done in a water bath to the sauce curled. To do this, you need to dial water in a wide saucepan or deep frying pan, boil and immediately turn off the fire. Then carefully lowered into the water pot of sauce, its contents while vigorously stirred.

The sauce should be prepared at a temperature of 60-80 degrees. If the saucepan will heat up too much, then the future will become a sauce omelet. If the temperature, on the contrary, would be too low, bearnez thickens and acquire a not very pleasant smell.

Little by little, the sauce will thicken. To this was gradually added butter, cut into small pieces, without turning the dish to stir vigorously. When all the butter is melted, add to the sauce herbs - chervil and tarragon.

Tricks of the Trade

Sauce bearnez equally good hot or cold, so it can be easily prepared in advance, or, on the contrary, at the last moment before serving, without having to worry that the taste of it somehow affected. How long to keep the sauce is recommended, but a couple of days, he is well preserved in the refrigerator in a sealed container.

Ready bearnaise sauce should be thick, homogeneous, with a shiny smooth surface. If the sauce starts to flake, the trouble is easy to help: need to add to the sauce ice cubes and whisk it well. If the sauce turned out uneven or too thin, it can be small portions add one beaten egg yolk, then wipe the resulting mixture through a strainer.

Maria Bykov

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