Béarnaise sauce (/bərˈneɪz/; French: [be.aʁ.nɛz]) is a sauce made of clarified butter emulsified in egg yolks and white wine vinegar and flavored with herbs. It is considered to be a “child” of the mother Hollandaise sauce, one of the five mother sauces in the French haute cuisine repertoire.[1] The difference is only in the flavoring: Béarnaise uses shallot, chervil, peppercorns, and tarragon in a reduction of vinegar and wine, while Hollandaise is more stripped down, using a reduction of lemon juice or white wine. (One means of preparing Béarnaise, see below, is to start with Hollandaise and add the other ingredients.) Its name is related to the province of Béarn, France (see below).[2]
In appearance, it is light yellow and opaque, smooth and creamy.
Béarnaise is a traditional sauce for steak.[3][4]
The sauce was accidentally invented by the chef Jean-Louis Françoise-Collinet, the accidental inventor of puffed potatoes (pommes de terre soufflées),[5] and served at the 1836 opening of Le Pavillon Henri IV, a restaurant at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, not far from Paris. This assumption is supported by the fact that the restaurant was in the former residence of Henry IV of France, a gourmet himself, who was from Béarn,[5][6] a former province now in the department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, in southwestern France.
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