Deep Fried Hollandaise

It’s been a while since I have posted, but with time on my hands, I thought I would share last night’s attempt at a new Modernist Cuisine technique: Deep Fried Hollandaise sauce created by Wylie Dufresne, the chef owner of restaurant wd~50 which closed in 2014. One of his best-known dishes was his take on eggs Benedict. Rather than the traditional recipe of Hollandaise on top of an English muffin, he encased the hollandaise in English muffin breadcrumbs and deep fried it. This followed from his famous fried mayonnaise served with pickled beef tongue. As you can imagine, frying mayonnaise and hollandaise, both a liquid at room temperature and an emulsion containing egg, presented challenges.

First, he had to make the sauce firm so it could be cut into cubes, breaded, and then fried. For this he utilized gelatin, but unfortunately the water required to dissolve the gelatin which was then added to the sauce, reacted violently with the hot oil. Freezing the sauce into cubes didn’t work either.

The solution came from Chris Young, founder of ChefSteps, one of my favourite cooking sites. In his previous life he was a research chef at the Fat Duck, and later a chef behind the cookbook Modernist Cuisine. He suggested incorporating gellan, a gelling hydrocolloid with a high heat tolerance. So gelatin was added to firm the sauce for portioning and gellan kept the sauce stable in the fryer.

By now you must be asking, but doesn’t a deep fryer cause the egg to scramble ruining the sauce? Yes it does, and the solution for that was to add modified corn starch, in particular ULTRA-SPERSE® M. I can’t say that I fully understand how this works, but it is used in food preparations subjected to severe processing like microwaving or I assume as in this case, deep frying!

Two other magic ingredients were added the reason for which is totally speculative on my part. Sodium hexametaphosphate is a sequestrant, which allows gelling agents to be hydrated at much lower temperatures. Citric acid is a weak organic acid found in citrus fruits like lemon, which I am guessing was added as an emulsifying agent to keep the egg yolk from separating. Citric acid is also a natural preservative and would add additional sour to the sauce.

So, there you have it, a straightforward Hollandaise, with eggs, butter, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne to which he added gelatin, hexametaphosphate, citric acid, gellan gum, and modified corn starch. All that remained to do was cut the gelled sauce into cubes and bread in the traditional way; flour, egg wash, dried breadcrumbs (in this case English muffin) and deep fry until golden brown at 190°C/ 375°F for about 90 sec. As an added bonus, the cubes can be kept frozen (hence the citric acid as a preservative?) and fried a la minute! I definitely plan on cooking this again but altering the flavour profile of the hollandaise.

This is the sauce after it had become firm. You can see from where I cut my first cube.

Rather than serve the fried hollandaise as per the original recipe with eggs Benedict, I elected to pair it with grilled asparagus. Also on the night's menu was some broiled fish with parmesan cheese (overcooked but still tasty) and rice.

Deep fried cube cut open revealing a delicious liquid hollandaise sauce!