Beurre Blanc Sauce

Beurre blanc is a classic French sauce that is made from butter and white wine vinegar. It is made by reducing a mixture of white wine, vinegar and shallots in a sauce pan and then emulsifying butter into the mixture until the right consistency and flavour is achieved. The sauce is known for its rich consistency, creamy texture and tangy flavour. Beurre blanc is a versatile sauce which goes well with a variety of dishes especially poached fish, chicken and root vegetables.

History of Beurre Blanc

Beurre blanc sauce originated in the Loire Valley of France in the 19th century. The sauce was first made by adding butter to a reduction of vinegar and shallots. Over time, the recipe evolved to also include white wine. It was considered a difficult sauce to make because it involved mounting a large amount of butter and keeping it stable. However, slowly other chefs in France, especially Paris, started learning how to make this delicious sauce and this lead the way for Beurre Blanc to become a staple French sauce. The popularity of this sauce also led to the popularity of finishing sauces with butter (‘monter au beurre‘) which is a technique that’s widely used in restaurants and kitchens today.

Ingredients

As I always talk about in these posts, high quality ingredients are very important to achieve a good sauce. Since this sauce is so simple, this is even more important. ‘High quality’ does not have to mean expensive, but sometimes it is worth spending a bit more money to get the right wine for example or to get a good butter that will emulsify properly and give the sauce it’s rich flavour and creamy texture.

The classic Beurre Blanc recipe uses Muscadet wine, which is a white wine made using grapes from the western part of the Loire Valley in the surrounding area of the city of Nantes. This wine has a clean and crisp flavour with a slightly acidic finish which is important for a good and tangy Beurre Blanc. You can still make a good Beurre Blanc with another wine if you cannot fine a Muscadet wine, or it is too expensive. Make sure to use a wine that has a similar clean flavour and if needed, adjust the amount of vinegar used to compensate for the lack of acidity in the wine.

Needless to say, classic Beurre Blanc uses French butter. While France is still known to produce some of the best butter in the world, nowadays, you can find plenty of good butters from other regions, such as Ireland. Having said that, not all butters are equal. French butter is usually made from crème fraîche, which is a cream that is thickened using a bacterial culture which leads to a natural fermentation. This is not always the case with other butters (they use pasteurised cream for example) and so French butter usually has a slightly more complex and nutty taste.

The flavour and quality of the butter is not only determined by the method or process used to produce it. There are other important factors such as the type of cows that produce the milk and their grazing conditions. It is difficult to state exactly what type of butter produces the best Beurre Blanc, because at the end of the day, it is a matter of preference. It is best to try different variations and pick the one that best suits your liking. If the goal is to mimic the classic Beurre Blanc as much as possible, try to use a French unpasteurised and unsalted butter.

Using cream to make Beurre Blanc

The classic Beurre Blanc recipe did not use cream. One might ask, why would you use cream in a recipe which is already so rich and creamy with butter? The reason for using cream has to do more with practicality (making the sauce easier to make) than with the flavour of the sauce in the end.

By adding some double cream to the white wine reduction, you create a more stable base for the butter to be emulsified in because the base becomes more fatty. This means that it will be easier to emulsify the butter into the base and that the sauce will be stable for longer before it starts splitting.

Things to watch out for

Beurre Blanc sauce is fairly simple and quick sauce to make. However, there are a few things that you need to be very careful about, to ensure optimal results.

The first thing to be careful of is the amount of acidity in the wine and in the vinegar. This is especially the case when making a small amount of Beurre Blanc at home. Unless you are very familiar with the ingredients you are using and perhaps you’ve used them to make Beurre Blanc before, I suggest that you don’t use the full amount of vinegar in the recipe but leave out a few drops. After mounting in the butter and you reach the desired consistency, you can taste the sauce and add the additional vinegar later if needed. Otherwise, if you start with too much acidity in the base, you might need to add a lot more butter to balance it out, which might mean that you either run out of butter or end up with a lot more Beurre Blanc than you actually need 🙂

Secondly, make sure that when adding the butter to the base, the sauce pan is not too hot and the heat is very low. It is also important that the butter is very cold. If not, the sauce is very likely to break and will not emulsify properly. The sauce should not boil at any point in time and should be only warm enough for the butter to melt slowly and emulsify into the base.

The third thing to watch out for is how you store the sauce once it is made. Beurre Blanc is an emulsified sauce and so it tends to break after it’s made if not stored properly. Ideally, the sauce should be made as close as possible to it being served. However, it can also be made a few hours in advance and then kept warm, either in a warm oven, on a hotplate or by placing the saucepan in a bowl of hot water. If kept like this for long, the sauce will start to thicken so it’s a good idea to stir it every once in a while and add a dash of cream to it if it thickens too much.

Variations

There are a few variations to the classic recipe that have evolved over the years. The first simple variation is made by either leaving or removing the shallots from the sauce. This will only vary the smoothness and the consistency of the sauce, rather than the flavour. There is also the possibility of adding herbs to the finished sauce, such as the chive Beurre Blanc shown in the picture above. Other herbs that can be used are tarragon or parsley.

Another interesting variation to Beurre Blanc is replacing the white wine and white wine vinegar with the red wine counterparts. This results in a pale purple coloured sauce (which often reminds me of bubble gum!) that is conveniently known as Beurre Rouge. From a flavour perspective, depending on the wine used, Beurre Rouge can be similar to Beurre Blanc, but it also sometimes gets a strange astringent aftertaste because of the tannins in the red wine.

Finally, there is another variation to Beurre Blanc which uses lemon juice instead of the wine and the vinegar. This is known as Beurre Citron. To impart stronger citrusy flavour, the zest of a lemon is usually infused in the lemon juice before the butter is mounted in.