At Challenge, we adore classic French cuisine (hello: butter!) not just because it tastes delicious, but because it has so much to teach us. In fact, despite growing trends in fast-casual cooking — both in restaurants and at home — classic French cuisine remains the backbone of most culinary school curricula. Why?

Partly, it’s because the French have done such a good job of organizing their food and drink methods. Between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century, in the era of the French Industrial Revolution, authorities saw a benefit to preserving and protecting their nation’s heritage foodways. French cheese, wine, and cuisine were all classified into highly regulated systems between 1850 and 1950.

One such classification was that of the so-called “Mother Sauces.” Historical French chefs like Auguste Escoffier wrote cookbooks as guides for creating and working with the building blocks of French cuisine. In modern kitchens, we take cookbooks and recipes for granted. But in the mid-19th century, dishes were made from memory, passed down from generation to generation. In 1903, Escoffier wrote Le Guide Culinaire as a comprehensive tutorial on how to cook French dishes — including the five Mother Sauces. These are:

  • Espagnole — a brown sauce based on stock, tomatoes, and mirepoix (the French holy trinity of finely chopped carrots, celery and onions)
  • Velouté — a stock- and butter-based white sauce
  • Béchamel — a creamy white sauce based on milk, butter, and flour
  • Tomate — a savory sauce centered on pork, stock, mirepoix and tomatoes
  • Hollandaise — an egg-based sauce, with butter and a squeeze of lemon juice

There’s one more sauce that, despite not being part of the original five, has become like an official amendment to the list: Beurre Blanc. This is an acid-based sauce blended with butter.

Every culinary school graduate can whip up one of these mother sauces in his or her sleep — that is the legacy of Escoffier and French preservation. Escoffier’s legend also lives on in the “daughter sauces,” variations on the Five Mother Sauces that include just about any gravy, cheese sauce, demi-glace or alfredo you can think of. For those based on butter, we like to think of all these sauces as an easy trick for dressing up a simple dish, like Hollandaise sauce on Classic Eggs Benedict, or poached asparagus drizzled with our Maltaise sauce (a daughter sauce of Hollandaise), or an upscale riff on macaroni and cheese with our Mornay Sauce with Pasta, or our recipe for Tarragon Beurre Blanc on a filet of mild fish like sole.

Try just a few of these sauces a whole world of culinary creativity will open to you. But before you begin, a few tips:

Timing is everything.

With butter sauces, you have to watch the time. With beurre blanc, it’s important to bring the acidic ingredients (i.e. vinegar and vermouth) to a boil to reduce the mixture, but then it’s just as important that the mixture cools completely to room temperature, up to 2 hours. For Hollandaise, the melted butter needs to be added to the egg mixture painstakingly slow, or else the sauce will break. And once it’s incorporated, it has to be whisked for a number of minutes. All that to say: plan to concentrate, and use a timer when first attempting any sauce.

Separation happens.

Hollandaise and bearnaise sauces are notorious for breaking — in other words, curdling or becoming impossible to emulsify when the starch, liquid and fat separate. We worked hard to develop our Foolproof Hollandaise sauce recipe, but sometimes breakage can’t be avoided. But if your sauce breaks, don’t toss it. Sometimes whisking a little cool water or cream into the sauce can help it re-emulsify. Give that trick a shot before throwing in the towel.

Hot butter helps with emulsification.

When building an egg-based sauce, it’s important not to just melt the butter to be incorporated, but to get its temperature quite hot. This may feel counterintuitive — won’t it curdle the eggs if it’s too hot? — but the key is adding the hot butter very, very slowly, over the course of a couple of minutes. It also helps to use a double boiler, which can stabilize the mixture with gentle, consistent heat.

Don’t boil the butter…

Once a sauce has incorporated butter, whether that’s in Hollandaise, Bearnaise, Beurre Blanc or any other sauce with high butter content, never bring the sauce to a boil. It will force the butter to separate from the other ingredients.

…and don’t salt until the end.

Including salt before the eggs cook in an egg-based sauce will curdle the mixture. Wait to salt the sauce until the end, if necessary.

Avoid reheating sauces.

Always plan to serve your butter sauce immediately, as cooled sauces will break when they’re reheated. A good rule of thumb is to keep the sauce above 98 degrees F for stability. If you’re in a sticky spot and need the sauce to be made a little in advance, keep it on the heat and add a little warm water from time to time, to keep the water-to-fat ratio consistent.