Choron sauce

Béarnaise sauce

Béarnaise sauce, garnished with tarragon.
Type	Sauce
Place of origin	Paris, France
Main ingredients	egg yolk, clarified butter, white wine vinegar

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. The difference is only in the flavoring: Béarnaise uses shallot, chervil, peppercorns, gherkin and tarragon in a reduction of vinegar and wine, while Hollandaise is more stripped down, using a reduction of lemon juice or white wine and peppercorns. (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.

In appearance, it is light yellow and opaque, smooth and creamy.

Béarnaise is a traditional sauce for steak.

The sauce was likely first created by the chef Collinet, the inventor of puffed potatoes (pommes de terre soufflées), 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 named for Henry IV of France, a gourmet himself, who was born in the Béarn region, a former province now in the department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, in southwestern France.