1-Minute Microwave Hollandaise (and How to Turn It into Béarnaise)

A one-minute cooking hack is one thing. But getting two (one-minute) hacks from the same recipe? Ingenious. I first found this one-minute microwave hollandaise recipe years ago in the book Desperation Dinners by Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross. Released in 1997 and now sadly out of print, this book of fast, family-ready meals was so handy, it was my go-to gift for new parents for years. 

If you can separate an egg, you can make this hollandaise in one minute flat. OK, maybe one minute and 15 seconds if you use half-and-half instead of cream. It works every time. It’s so stable, you can even refrigerate it and reheat it in the microwave. Asparagus for Easter, broccoli for Thanksgiving or Christmas — what steamed vegetable doesn’t get sexy under fat drizzles of hollandaise? 

For a while, that’s all I did with it. But then I remembered a chef hack I learned years ago for making béarnaise sauce. In the French sauce world, béarnaise is the “child” of the mother sauce hollandaise, both emulsions based on melted butter and egg yolks. It’s unbelievable drizzled over grilled flank steak. 

Béarnaise sauce is also fussy: It starts with simmering white wine vinegar, peppercorns, shallots, tarragon and chervil until it all reduces down to a couple of tablespoons, then stirring that into hollandaise. The chef trick? Skip the vinegar reduction and just stir a little A1 steak sauce into hollandaise. That’s when I looked at my microwave hollandaise and it hit me: Microwave béarnaise, in less than 90 seconds. It’s so fast, you can make it after you take the steak off the grill to rest.