Julia Child's Beurre Blanc Is The Restaurant-Style Sauce You Can Make Any Night Of The Week

There are miracles happening in restaurant kitchens every day. Cooking techniques and complex recipes that can take years to master and require special equipment like high-temperature stoves or expensive food slicers. Thankfully, beurre blanc, or "white butter" sauce is not one of those, despite being drizzled over dishes in upscale restaurants with flair. In fact, all you need are a handful of ingredients you probably already have, a pan, and a low flame to make this coveted, emulsified butter sauce. Even acclaimed television cooking show host Julia Child considered beurre blanc a go-to sauce, when you don't quite know how to finish a dish. It's so simple you can whip up the indulgent, creamy sauce even on a weeknight, adding flair to fish, chicken, or roasted vegetables.

Child has been quoted as observing that "with enough butter, anything is good." Plenty of butter is one of Child's many tips to transform cooking into art. Whether you're basting a sizzling steak or creating an indulgent bread and butter flight, the salt-cream combo of quality butter upgrades almost any dish. Beurre blanc is next-level butter. While it's not one of France's five mother sauces, it is a related, emulsified sauce. It's similar to a béarnaise, minus the eggs and significantly easier to get right. Child's version of the classic sauce is a popular one to replicate. Her main twist to the original? Adding a finishing spritz of lemon juice for a refreshing hit of acid that also helps stabilize the sauce. In her book "Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home," Child describes first learning about beurre blanc in Nantes, France.

At its core, beurre blanc is sautéed shallots, equal parts reduced white wine and vinegar, and cold chunks of butter. Cooked and whisked over very low heat, the end result is silky and creamy and pours elegantly over fish or vegetables like a hollandaise. What sets beurre blanc apart from hollandaise or béarnaise, as Julia Child notes in her book, is that "it is only warm flavored butter — butter emulsified." She credits the acidic wine-vinegar mix for serving as the liquid base in which the butter emulsifies. 

Beurre blanc is easy to master, as long as you pay attention to a few simple tricks. As with making biscuits, the butter should be as cold as possible, preferably frozen. Cut sticks into equal chunks before freezing. With the acidic vinegar, too much butter at once or too high a temperature can make the butter split instead of emulsifying. You can counter this with a bit of ice water or heavy cream (which technically makes it beurre blanc Nantais). Melt the butter over a super-low flame (below 135 degrees Fahrenheit), removing the pan from the heat as needed. Using the proper whisk will help aerate the butter, making it creamier. Add that signature squeeze of lemon at the end for brightness. In the words of the French, c'est du gâteau!