Reheating Sauces

Yesterday, my sister found this blog in the course of an email search. I hadn't been promoting this other than a recent addition to my email footer. Also, Johanna over at the very interesting and highly recommended Comics Worth Reading linked to me once after I asked her a question about the Amazon Associates program. So, I was curious to know who was looking at this, as I had previously assumed I had an audience of, maybe, 3. Not that it should affect what I'm doing, which is to motivate myself and document progress. Anyway, I installed a hit counter (Blogpatrol), which also includes some reporting on how people got to the site. One feature is that they tell you the search criteria used to get here if someone used Google.

Whew. What's my point, other than to freak you out about Big Brother?

Someone yesterday got here with the phrase "reheating bernaise sauce." So this reminded me of something I hadn't shared yet. 1 1/2 weeks ago, I had my at-home success with hollandaise sauce, for which I closed the report with "Eggs Benedict tomorrow!" That Sunday, I went ahead with that plan and put the sauce in the microwave. Guess what? Yeah, I'm sure everyone else in the world knows, but it almost immediately broke. The sad thing is that I tried for 30 seconds (on the default setting of High) first and it seemed okay. But rather than stirring what I had at that state, I popped it in for 30 seconds more. That's what did it.

In Sauce class a few days later, our hollandaise got cold before our end of class meal and I wanted to avoid the same result. So, I made a warm water bath and very gently whisked the sauce to keep the temperature even. Note that before I possibly ruined my teammate's work, I did run this by the instructor and get the thumb's up. The method worked very well. I need to look up how to save those after they do actually break or to thicken it up if it's too thin; there must be a way. If the yolks curdle, it's hopeless, but afterwards...

So there you go. You implicitly ask and you receive.