Took me 3 weeks to figure out why my hollandaise kept breaking
So I was making hollandaise every Sunday brunch for like a month and it kept breaking right at the end, and I could not figure out why. I tried everything, different whisk speeds, adding the butter slower, even switched to a new brand of eggs, but nothing worked. Turns out my butter was too cold, I was pulling it straight from the walk-in and the temp difference was shocking the emulsion. Once I let it sit out for 20 minutes and it hit around 65 degrees, it came together perfect every time. Anyone else run into a dumb simple fix after weeks of overthinking?
Cold butter can for sure cause issues but room temp butter alone won't fix a break if your yolks are too hot or too cold. The real thing that saved me was getting the yolks and butter within about 10 degrees of each other, since the emulsion cares more about matching temps than any one magic number. Glad it clicked for you though, three weeks of broken sauce would drive me up a wall.