Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, August 09, 2022 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.
Question:
My sauce broke, which to me means it is not creamy with some curdling of the cream. Is that because I substituted half-n-half, or because I need to practice my technique?
— Estrella Creates
Answer:
So that's actually could be a couple different things. You know, basically, the reason the sauce is breaking is the emulsification is breaking down. So you're fat as separating from your liquid. So if you're using something, you know, like if like eggs or a typical I'm also fire, you know and something like a hollandaise and if that, you know, you're whisking an oil or butter into the sauce, you know kind of the same way. If you wouldn't have vegan one you basically, you know, whisking that fat into the liquid to be able to get it to emulsify now. If you add that fat too quickly into that liquid, it can actually break as well. Now you can also get it too hot so at high temperatures, you know, sometimes sauces will break apart as well. So you want to keep you know, the sauce a little bit, you know, especially if you're doing an egg, you know, and since you're doing the chicken one, I'm guessing you're doing Pigs on that but it's about 180 degrees is where eggs start to coagulate. So you want to try to keep it below boiling for certain, you know flower sauces can typically be heated a little bit more but you want to keep them again. It is simmer. You don't want to get them boiling other things is that the sauce might have been kept too long, you know, so they're typically these sauces, you know are served best right away, you know, so as soon as you're serving or soon as you're done with the dish try to serve those close to that as well and right before you do try to very gently, you know, whisk with the spoon or a whisk as well, but just want to let it cool down a little bit and then we Re-wisk that to be able to make that work for you. And then lastly, you know, sometimes if you refrigerate sauces like that some of these like kind of finicky sauces will also separate when they're cooled down below room temperature. Typically, I'll just kind of heat them up just a little bit more on a saute pan and then whisk them in the pan to be able to get that sauce. So it's not breaking again. So those are probably my best hints at that. So it's a little bit of technique. It shouldn't be that your ass using the half and half because that's basically a fat, you know, but try a couple of those different things and see what works out for you. Hope that helps.