What did I do wrong?
Maybe I can pull a jwz and ask my readers for help — cooking help! Perhaps even the Hacker Kitchen can advise me.
So there I was, making a simple hot salmon mousse, and the cookbook explains how to make a nice sauce to dribble over it:
Melt 2 Tbsp butter in a nonstick saucepan. Dilute 2 tsp cornstarch into 1/2 cup milk, then add gradually to the melted butter over low-medium heat, while stirring continuously. Add 1/2 cup dry white wine, salt, pepper, and continue to stir until sauce thickens. Remove it from the heat, stir in 2 beaten egg yolks and lemon rind gradually, whisking fast until the sauce is even and smooth. […]
Seems easy enough, doesn’t it? I melted the butter, then thoroughly mixed the cornstarch into some milk and added the milk to the butter. But when I added the wine — bam! Instant curdling. I ended up with a big lumpy, gooey mass in the middle of the sauce. I couldn’t tell if it was coagulated milk solids (reacting to the acidity of the wine), or if it was the cornstarch, or some combination of the two. I was so frustrated that I tossed the whole sauce, and repeated the whole experiment using skim milk (rather than whole milk). Exact same results. So I guess milkfat wasn’t coagulating; it must have been either the milk proteins or the cornstarch.
Mind you, I’m no spring chicken when it come to cornstarch. I remember my naive days of trying to mix cornstarch into a big bowl of soy sauce, and getting ‘clumps’, and then learning how to dissolve it first in a teeny bit of sauce. But this whole experience has bewildered me.
Cooks, what’s going on here?
Our daughter was our expert cook, but we lost her. Ask your wife.
Was the wine cold? Did you add it slowly? I’ve seen this in baking, & have speculated that it’s the temperature difference causing the butter to re-solidify. But that’s a SWAG.
The wife was stumped as well when I showed her.
And the wine was exactly room temperature (I had just opened it from the wine rack), and I did in fact add it slowly to the hot butter/milk/cornstarch liquid.
Did you taste the wine? Was it OK? Remember that vinegar + milk = buttermilk (curdling) and old wine or bad wine goes to vinegar….
This is a common problem. I assume this sauce was close to a Hollandaise?
I will look into it- I recall from days when I had time to cook it from scratch NY Times recommends using a blender.