Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
Today, I’m continuing my series on the seven “mother” sauces of California Cuisine. Having covered the first five sauces: mayonnaise, pesto, vinaigrette, salsa and tomato, I’m now starting in on recipes for and derived from Hollandaise sauce. Today, I’m sharing my recipe for Sauce Maltaise, which is basically Hollandaise sauce with blood orange juice and zest. It’s light, very mildly sweet and a lovely accompaniment to seafood and vegetables, particularly asparagus:
Sauce Maltaise is a lighter version of traditional Hollandaise sauce, and a great example of a traditional French Cuisine “mother” sauce that fits the flavors and freshness of California Cuisine.
If you’ve never had blood oranges before, they are sort of an orange on steroids. The flesh of the blood orange can be anywhere from deep orange to deep cranberry red and is very photogenic! The flavor is more intense than a standard orange–a little more tart perhaps: a strong orange flavor with undertones of berries–like raspberries, strawberries, boysenberries–some of the more tart berry flavors.
Sauce Maltaise is so-named because the blood orange is native to Malta and was highly prized in the royal European courts as far back as the 18th century. Mr. Soup and I fell in love with them on our first trip to Italy. We flew into Milan and took a train to the Cinque Terre. We stayed in the town of Vernazza, which boasts an inviting piazza that sits right at the foot of the Ligurian Sea. It was mid-April and on our first day, we were up at an absurdly early hour because of jet lag. Nothing but the Tabac was open, but they had a coffee counter where we could get a fresh round of olive focaccia bread, a macchiato and an orange juice, which overall made us very happy. We sat out on the sunny piazza and they brought us our food, complete with red juice.
Red juice?
We looked at each other and then at the server and said, in broken Italian “we wanted orange juice.” The beautiful young woman said, “si, si–arancia! arancia!” We stared at her for a moment and again she said (a little more emphatically, this time including hand gestures) “arancia! arancia!”, which of course, is Italian for “orange.” I glanced inside the shop where the fresh orange juice was being processed in a machine and realized the oranges were blood oranges and told Mr. Soup. We nodded and then took a sip of the juice. It was bold, sweet, tangy, and tasted like liquid sunshine and we both fell instantly in love with this thirst-quenching elixir!
When we got home, we planted a blood orange tree in our front yard. It stayed mostly just a stick with a few leaves for about the first 10 years we had it until one of its tap roots apparently suddenly found a good source of water and it started to grow in earnest. About two or three years later, we had so many oranges that the tree heaved with them. We drank orange juice until we thought we’d burst and gave oranges away at an alarming rate, but still couldn’t keep up with production. Since then, the tree has given us a more than adequate number of oranges and I was excited to find Sauce Maltaise because it would be another use of these wonderfully juicy gems.
Sauce Maltaise is a classic, lightly sweet, silky sauce that is gorgeous with so many different things. I sauced up a filet of steelhead trout for dinner the other night and it was awesome:
It would also be great on a firm white fish, like cod. It would nicely dress up an humble chicken breast or even enhance pan-seared shrimp or scallops. And, of course, it’s great with all kinds of vegetables, including asparagus as pictured above, broccoli or broccolini, and it might also work on some of the fall squashes, like acorn or maybe even butternut squash. I’m going to try that this fall and see how it goes. Needless to say, this sauce is quite versatile and very easy to make.
In the recipe I’m including, I used a mixture of both blood orange juice and a squeeze of lemon juice because I like my Hollandaise to be a little tart. You could leave out the lemon juice if you want the sauce to be on the sweeter side, but be sure to include the healthy pinch of salt to balance out the flavors. Also, I blended the orange zest into the sauce–I think it gives a nice punch to the flavor to have the zest fully incorporated into the sauce, but you can easily fold the zest in at the end of the blending if you want to have the flecks of zest showing in your sauce.
Tune in later in the week for more fun with Hollandaise sauce!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
