The Mother Sauce

After a full 10 hours of sleep last night, I'm feeling like a brand new person! Yes, my feet and legs are still partially aching from a week of standing in the kitchen, but wow did I need the day off. On Friday, we turned some of the stocks we made on Thursday into 5 delicious sauces, some of them called the Mother Sauces because of their importance in French saucemaking. The five sauces: Espagnole, Chicken Velouté, Bechamel, Tomato Sauce and Hollandaisecan be transformed into hundreds and thousands of different other sauces just by changing a few ingredients. For the lesson we made Espagnole, Chicken Veloute, Bechamel, Chateaubriand and a White Wine Sauce. For this lesson, we also learned about thickening agents like rouxs, reduction and beurre manié that transform stocks into sauces.

The first sauce, Espagnole, is made from veal stock, which although it smelled good when we cooked it on Thursday, smelled absolutely foul and had transformed into a massive vat of veal bone-scented jello by the time we were working with it on Friday. To get the amount of veal stock we needed, I had to stick my entire arm and part of my face into a huge plastic container of the gelatinous stock, trying not to gag visibly in front of Chef Rogers. The sauce is made from rendering bacon fat, then adding carrots, onions, tomato paste and tomatoes and making a roux with flour and butter once the vegetables have browned. Then the veal stock is added and reduced until the sauce is ready to be strained. Even after making the Espagnole sauce, I couldn't get the scent and look of the stock out of my head and didn't enjoy the taste of the sauce at all.

The next two sauces that we made, Bechamel and Chicken Velouté are made the same way, except Bechamel is made with milk and Chicken Velouté is made with chicken stock. I made the Chicken Velouté while my partner, Christian, made the Bechamel sauce. For some reason, the recipe that we had been given in our textbooks had not enough flour and butter to make a substantial roux for the Chicken Velouté, so while Christian's Bechamel developed into a rich and thick white sauce, my Chicken Velouté remained a foggier version of Chicken stock until Chef Nick told me to make a beurre manié (a mixture of softened butter and flour) and add it to the sauce to thicken it properly.

After Bechamel and Chicken Velouté, we moved on to the Vin Blanc sauce and the Chauteaubriand. Vin blanc was relatively simple, it consisted of shallots, white wine, fish fumet (stock), and cream. First we reduced the wine with the shallots, then added the stock to reduce, then added cream at the end to thicken the sauce even more. This sauce was my favorite, it was rich yet light at the same time and had the most beautiful creamy yellow color.

The Chateaubriand sauce was made with 3 different types of mushrooms (white, oyster and porcini), shallots, white wine, brandy and the espagnole sauce that we made earlier in the day (which by this point had begun turning into a gelatinous mixture with basically the same smell as the veal stock except with a little bacon added in). For this recipe, we had to flambé the mushrooms with the brandy, which I let my partner do because I'd like to keep my eyebrows and they do not like shooting flames of fire. Unfortunately ours didn't light up in flames as flamboyantly as we wanted it to...maybe next time. The sauce turned out a reddish, brown color, similar to the Espagnole, but with mushrooms and the flavor of brandy. Chef Rogers said we reduced it too far, making the sauce thicker than it should have been, but it was still passable.

At 10 minutes to 3 p.m, Chef Rogers released us from the kitchen to enjoy the weekend, his arms full of the gifts students from other levels drop by everyday in our kitchen (warm croissants, mini cupcakes, perfectly decorated plum tarts). The part of the weekend I'm most looking forward to? A lot of sitting.