Nearly Guilt Free Mock Hollandaise Sauce

Safest Choice is proud to share the following post written by Johanna from Low Sodium Blog

My perfectly poached egg silently hibernates under a silky blanket of hollandaise sauce. I pierce my fork through its hidden layers.  The pop of the delicate white pillow gives way to a rush of warm yellow yolk.  A vibrant glow, like the gentle sun stirring the early morning twilight, slowly inches across the plane of the English muffin.  The yolk dribbles onto the plate.  Drop by drop, the dawn creeps past the muffins’ shadowed cavities, curling under the rippled edges of a perfectly toasted crust – for a brief moment, its motion comes to a pause. Morning has broken.

Not wanting to miss the splendor of the sunrise, I take further action.  My fork again rises to the occasion, slicing through a labyrinth of layers, blending flavors and textures.  This is where crunch meets decadence and where savory meets lightness. The perfect bite may only last a second or two, but the revelry of the daybreak carries me through the rest of the day.  This time, it is guilt free.

guilt free eggs benedict

About Us

Wanderlust is a wonderful thing – the unexpected leads us to experiences that challenge our souls. For over twenty years, we’ve cooked our way around the world.  We’ve taken classes in some of our favorite travel spots like Paris, Marrakesh, Nafplion, Istanbul, Chiang Mai, Beijing, and Urubamba.  We’ve met so many wonderful people along the way and we’ve savored every moment and flavor. So when my mom became a kidney transplant recipient and my husband was diagnosed with heart disease, we put our heads together to find a way to enjoy tasty low sodium (and healthier) food and still keep the experience fun.   We didn’t want to feel like we were missing out on life because in reality, we’re not.

We’ve created a place for you to read about our journeys and find more delicious recipes online at Low Sodium Blog.  It’s an exciting journey that we’ve integrated into our daily lives. We think our recipes are just as tasty being low sodium as normal recipes – we’re certainly not missing out on the flavor or the fun!

What Inspired the Recipe Re-invention?

Our inspiration behind our mock hollandaise sauce and Reinventing Eggs Benedict: Lightening the Love was actually sparked by a completely unrelated series of events – I had returned from a trip to Southern Greece completely heartbroken.

Moussaka, a Greek dish commonly capped by béchamel sauce, is one of my favorite comfort foods.  In my mind, I had wanted to taste authentic Moussaka while visiting its homeland – this was the one thing that I had wanted to eat while traveling in Greece. Unbeknownst to me, this savory delight is typically only served as a [summer] seasonal dish in Southern Greek restaurants, and I had arrived “out of season”.  Tavern after tavern relayed the bad news (apparently this happens to a lot of low season tourists).  As you can imagine, rejection is a bitter pill to swallow. I returned from Greece devastated, disenchanted, and determined to eat Moussaka.

After a several weeks of making and eating Moussaka to my heart’s content (using an adapted olive oil based béchamel sauce, which I feel is relatively guilt-free) the light bulb came on! Why not whip up a mock hollandaise sauce loosely based on an olive oil based béchamel sauce? Many of the other mock hollandaise sauces floating around rely on butter or mayo as a base – ingredients that we don’t even have on our grocery list (high fat ingredients are not commonly kept in our fridge because someone in our home has heart disease).  After a handful of attempts, we refined our mock hollandaise recipe to what it is today (to us, it’s guilt-free).  Next, we then came up with a recipe for low sodium English muffins to complete the meal.  We had a ton of fun making English muffins from scratch and we hope you do too!

Mock Hollandaise Recipe

Yield: 1 cup

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons flour
1  1/4 teaspoon white vinegar (5% acidity)
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 pinch chile (or paprika) powder, ground
1 cup (fat free) milk (cold)

Directions

1.  In a medium saucepan, add the olive oil, flour, white vinegar, lemon zest and chile powder.  Stir until  smooth (the lemon zest may have a little texture, but overall this creates a paste-like consistency).

2. Whisk in the (cold) milk, adding it slowly to keep a consistent texture. Place the saucepan on the heating element, heat and bring to a low simmer, whisking throughout the heating/simmer process until the sauce begins to thicken.

3.  Turn down the heat to low, and continue to whisk, roughly 7-10 minutes. (If your sauce gets too thick, add more (cold) milk and whisk into the sauce).

4.  Voila! Serve warm over poached eggs.