Béarnaise is the sauce that makes a good steak into an event. Pale gold, thick enough to sit where you put it, sharp with vinegar and shallot underneath all that butter, and carrying a clean anise note from tarragon that cuts through beef fat better than almost anything else on a plate.

Difficulty is genuinely moderate, and it is the one sauce on this site where I will not pretend otherwise. Nothing here takes long. The whole thing is about twenty five minutes. But an emulsion of egg yolk and butter can break or scramble, and both happen fast, so this is a sauce you make with your full attention and nothing else on the stove.

Here is the part most recipes get wrong. Béarnaise is not hollandaise with tarragon stirred into it. That is the shortcut you will find in a lot of places, and it produces a sauce that tastes rich and flat at the same time, because the thing that defines béarnaise is a reduction of vinegar, white wine, shallot and tarragon stems boiled down to almost nothing before a single yolk goes near the pan. That reduction is where the acidity, the depth and the actual tarragon flavor come from. Skip it, add chopped tarragon to a finished hollandaise instead, and you have a herb hollandaise. It is fine. It is not this.

The second thing: use fresh tarragon. Dried tarragon loses the anise compounds that make the sauce work and leaves a dusty, hay-like flavor behind. If fresh tarragon is not available, make hollandaise or beurre blanc instead and come back to this another week.

This makes about 1 cup, enough for four servings.

Equipment

Three pieces do the work here, and I stock all three.

• 2 Quart Sauce Pan with Lid Set. The reduction takes a half cup of liquid down to about two tablespoons, and in a wide pan that happens in ninety seconds and scorches before you have looked at it twice. A small pan with a heavy base gives you a deeper column of liquid and a slower, more forgiving reduction. The same pan then becomes the water bath for the emulsion.
• Stainless Steel Whisk Egg Beater. The emulsion is built entirely by whisk, and the shape of it decides how much work you do. You want a balloon whisk with plenty of wires, because it moves air and butter through the yolks fast. A flat or narrow whisk will get there eventually, and your forearm will know about it.
• Waterproof Digital Kitchen Thermometer with LCD. This is the sauce where a thermometer stops being optional. Egg yolks thicken from about 145F and scramble by about 165F, so the entire sauce lives inside a twenty degree window that you cannot see. Waterproof matters because you are working directly over steam.

You will also need a heatproof bowl that sits inside the pan without touching the water, a fine mesh strainer, and a ladle or a small pitcher for pouring butter slowly. I do not stock bain-marie bowls or fine mesh strainers. A stainless mixing bowl that rests in the rim of the pan is exactly right, and a tea strainer will handle this volume.

Ingredients

For the reduction

• 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 2 tablespoons shallot, minced, about 1 small shallot
• Stems from 1 bunch fresh tarragon, roughly chopped
• 10 black peppercorns, cracked

For the sauce

• 1 cup unsalted butter, 2 sticks, clarified, which yields about 3/4 cup
• 3 large egg yolks
• 1 tablespoon cold water
• 2 tablespoons fresh tarragon leaves, chopped
• 1 teaspoon fresh chervil, chopped, optional
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• A pinch of cayenne
• A few drops of lemon juice, to finish

Method

Before you start

Clarify the butter first and keep it warm. Melt the two sticks slowly, skim the foam, and pour off the golden fat leaving the milky sediment behind. Whole melted butter is about 16 percent water, and that water is the single most common reason a béarnaise breaks, because an emulsion of yolk and fat has no use for extra water arriving halfway through. Hold the clarified butter around 120F, warm to the touch and not hot. Cold butter will not emulsify and hot butter will cook the yolks.

Strip the tarragon and keep both parts. Leaves go into the finished sauce, stems go into the reduction. The stems carry as much anise flavor as the leaves and they are the reason the reduction tastes of tarragon rather than just vinegar.

Have everything within reach before you turn on the heat. Once the yolks start thickening you cannot leave to find the salt. This sauce moves faster than you expect it to.

Make the reduction

Simmer the vinegar, wine, shallot, tarragon stems and peppercorns together. Bring it to a gentle simmer in the saucepan over medium heat and let it go until roughly two tablespoons remain, about 8 to 10 minutes. You are not just concentrating acid here. You are pulling the shallot and tarragon into the liquid and boiling off the raw alcohol edge of the wine, and that combination is what will make the finished sauce taste like béarnaise instead of like butter.

Strain it and let it cool to warm. Press the solids to get everything out of them, then discard. Two tablespoons is the target and a little less is better than a little more. If you overshoot and it goes almost dry, add a teaspoon of water rather than starting again.

Build the emulsion

Set up the water bath. An inch of water in the saucepan, brought to a bare simmer, with your bowl sitting in the rim and the base of the bowl clear of the water. Direct contact with the water puts the bowl at 212F, and yolks scramble at 165F. The gap between those two numbers is the entire reason this is done over steam rather than over a flame.

Whisk the yolks, the cold water and the cooled reduction together off the heat first. Get them properly combined and slightly foamy before any heat is involved. The tablespoon of cold water is not filler, it gives the yolks a little extra room to heat gradually instead of setting the moment they warm.

Whisk over the steam until the yolks thicken to a ribbon. Three to five minutes, whisking constantly and scraping the sides. The mixture will go pale, triple in volume, and reach the point where the whisk leaves a trail across the base of the bowl that holds for a second before closing. Target 145F to 150F. Pull the bowl off the heat every thirty seconds or so if it is moving fast, because you can always put it back and you cannot unscramble an egg.

Add the butter

Start with a thin trickle, not a pour. Off the heat, add the warm clarified butter a few drops at a time to begin with, whisking constantly. The first two tablespoons decide everything. That is where the emulsion forms, and adding faster than the yolks can absorb is how a sauce breaks.

Once it thickens, pour in a slow steady stream. After a quarter of the butter is in, the sauce visibly tightens and you can move faster. Keep whisking. If it gets too thick to move easily before the butter is finished, loosen it with a teaspoon of warm water and carry on.

Finish and hold

Fold in the tarragon leaves, the chervil and the seasoning last. Chopped tarragon added at the end keeps its color and its perfume. Added earlier it goes drab and the anise cooks off. Salt, a pinch of cayenne, and a few drops of lemon juice to lift it. Taste it now, because this is the sauce.

Hold it warm, not hot. Around 120F to 130F, in the bowl, off the heat, near the stove or over the switched-off water bath. It stays smooth for an hour or two. Below about 90F it starts to set and above 150F it will split.

When it breaks, and how to bring it back

It will break at some point, and a broken béarnaise is almost always recoverable. Learning the rescue is more useful than learning to be careful.

If it splits into a greasy, curdled mess, take a fresh egg yolk and a teaspoon of cold water in a clean bowl, whisk them together, then whisk the broken sauce into that new base a spoonful at a time. You are rebuilding the emulsion around a fresh emulsifier.

If it only looks slightly thin or grainy, a tablespoon of ice water whisked in hard will usually pull it back together. Try this first.

If the yolks have actually scrambled, meaning you can see solid flecks, that one is finished. Strain it if the flecks are few, start again if they are not. Scrambled protein does not go back into solution.

Making it without a bain-marie

The blender method trades some texture for a lot of reliability, and on a weeknight that is a fair trade. It solves the same problem the water bath solves, which is getting hot fat into yolks without the yolks setting.

Blend the yolks with the cooled reduction for about fifteen seconds, then with the motor running pour the clarified butter in a thin steady stream. The blade does the emulsifying and the moving butter carries enough heat to thicken the yolks as it goes.

Use the butter hotter here, around 180F, because there is no other heat source in this version. It still must not boil.

Stir the tarragon in by hand afterwards, off the blade, or you will get a green sauce rather than a pale gold one flecked with herb.

The result is slightly denser and less airy than the whisked version. Nobody at the table will complain.

Making it with pasteurized eggs

Béarnaise is held at around 130F, which is below the 160F that USDA FSIS gives as the safe minimum for dishes containing eggs. For most people that is an accepted risk, the same one carried by hollandaise, aioli and a soft-boiled egg. For anyone pregnant, very young, elderly, or immunocompromised, it is not one I would take.

Use pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized yolks, which are treated to destroy salmonella and behave almost identically here. They take slightly longer to reach the ribbon stage, so allow an extra minute or two and trust the thermometer rather than the clock.

Or take the sauce to 160F deliberately. Hold the yolk mixture at 160F over the steam, checking with the thermometer and whisking without pause, before you start adding butter. It is a narrower window and it needs attention, but it is the same technique.

The sauces that branch off it

Béarnaise is not a mother sauce, it is a daughter of hollandaise, and it has children of its own. Each of these is the same sauce with one change.

Choron. Fold in a tablespoon or two of thick tomato paste or heavily reduced tomato at the end. Pale orange, slightly sweeter, traditional with beef tournedos.

Foyot, also called Valois. Fold in a tablespoon of warm meat glaze. Deeper and savorier, and the version that goes on a rib of beef.

Paloise. Swap the tarragon for fresh mint, in the reduction and at the finish. This is the one for lamb, and it works far better than the mint sauce most people default to.

Make ahead, storage, and reheating

Make ahead. The reduction can be made up to three days ahead and refrigerated, which removes most of the time pressure on the day. The sauce itself cannot be made ahead in any meaningful way.

Holding. One to two hours at 120F to 130F is the honest limit for quality. Bear in mind that this sits inside the 40F to 140F range where bacteria multiply fastest, so treat two hours as the outside limit for safety as well as for texture.

Refrigerating. Possible for two days in a sealed container, but understand what you are getting. It sets solid and it will not come back to the same sauce.

Reheating. Warm it very gently over the same steam, whisking, and expect to whisk in a teaspoon of warm water to bring it back. It will be looser and less refined than it was. I would not serve a reheated béarnaise to guests, and I would happily put it on my own eggs the next morning.

Freezing. No. It separates and does not recover.

A Short History

Béarnaise is younger than most people assume. It is generally credited to Le Pavillon Henri IV, a restaurant at Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris, in the 1830s, where it appears on the menu under a chef named Collinet.

The name points to Béarn, the region in the far southwest of France that was the birthplace of Henri IV, who the restaurant was named after. That is the connection, and it is a nod to the building rather than to the region's cooking. Henri IV died in 1610, more than two centuries before the sauce existed, so any version of the story in which he ate it is folklore.

What is documented is that it arrived fully formed into a French restaurant culture that had spent the previous fifty years systematizing sauces, and it has not changed since. The recipe you would have been served in 1840 is the one above.

Nutrition, estimated

An estimate, calculated ingredient by ingredient from USDA FoodData Central entries rather than measured in a lab. Per serving, based on 4 servings of about 1/4 cup each.

Calculated from the USDA entries for clarified butter, raw egg yolk and table salt, cross-checked across two independent mirrors. The figures use the roughly 3/4 cup of clarified butter the recipe actually yields, not the full cup of whole butter you start with, since the water and milk solids are poured off. The reduction is excluded: almost all of it is discarded with the strained solids, and the two tablespoons that remain contribute a rounding error.

This is a sauce that is essentially butter and egg yolk, so almost every calorie here is fat and there is no version of it that is not. The cholesterol is the three yolks. The sodium is almost entirely the half teaspoon of salt, and it is still low for a sauce, which is deliberate, because béarnaise usually lands on a steak that has already been salted properly. A quarter cup per person is a generous restaurant portion and two tablespoons is plenty alongside a well-seasoned piece of beef.

References

• Shell Eggs from Farm to Table, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. The 160F safe minimum for dishes containing eggs, the case for pasteurized shell eggs, and the recommended handling of recipes that use lightly cooked yolks.
• The Danger Zone, 40F to 140F, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. Why a sauce held warm on the pass has a time limit, and where the holding temperature for this one sits relative to it.

Related Guides

• The Five Mother Sauces, which explains where béarnaise sits in the family and why it is a daughter rather than a mother
• Classic Hollandaise Sauce Recipe, the parent sauce, and the one to learn first if this is your first emulsion
• How to Butcher Beef, for choosing the cut this sauce was made for

Thank you

Thank you for making the reduction rather than reaching for the shortcut. It is fifteen extra minutes and it is the whole difference between this sauce and a herb hollandaise, and most recipes will not tell you that.

If you make it, I would like to hear how it went, and especially whether it broke and what you did about it. Tell me here.

If this one worked for you, the hollandaise guide covers the emulsion on its own, which is the half of this recipe that takes the practice.

Cook Bolder, Serve Wiser, Eat Better.

Chef Alan, 35 years in professional kitchens and a six-time Four Diamond chef
Wine Drop Cookery