Week 2 ...Sauces!!!

Second week is here and we learned how to cook sauces, it was really nice learning the whole process and anthropology of it as well.

The Five mother sauces, as they are called are: Hollandaise, Bechamel, Classic Tomato, Spangnole and Velute, they are called mother sauces because they are the base to many small sauces, like for example many cheese sauces are made out of béchamel plus cheese. This five sauces of French cuisine  were designated the five "mother sauces" by Auguste Escoffier in the 19th century. One of the fathers of french cuisine.

To cook some sauces we had to learn how to make Roux.

Roux is made out clarified butter and flour, and its used to thicken.

But first I want to tell you about the history of this simple blend of flour and fat: quite a history for something with just two ingredients. Roux has been thickening savory dishes for centuries. Its first incarnation was in France, and made with butter and flour. This mixture is only heated for a few minutes—just enough time to cook the flour—and is the base of many sauces (including white or béchamel sauce) as well as soups and stews. Butter is the fat used, as butter is typical in French cooking (rather than the lard or oil used in Cajun roux).

A butter-flour roux is most often used as the base of a sauce to which milk, cream or broth is added, and cooked for only minutes as butter would burn if cooked at a high temperature, or for a long time. The butter-flour mixture can also be made ahead and kept in the refrigerator to use whenever a dish needs to be thickened.

A brief History of Roux....

As far back as 1651, François Pierre La Varenne wrote a cookbook in which he mentioned liaison de farine which was made with flour and lard. He called this mixture “thickening of flower,” and it later came to be known as farine frit, or roux. La Varenne’s recipe:

                “Thickening of flower. Melt some lard, take out the mammocks; put your flower into your melted lard, seeth it well, but have a care it stick not to the pan, mix some onion with it proportionably. When it is enough, put all with good broth, mushrums and a drop of vinegar. Then after it hath boiled with its seasoning, pass all through the strainer and put in a pot. When you will use it, you shall set it upon warm embers for to thicken or allay your sauces”.

In the mid-1700s, the mixture was called roux de farine, employed butter rather than lard, and was cooked to a light creamy color. One hundred years after that, many French chefs thought roux de farine was relied upon too much, while others (including Antonin Carême) felt differently. Carême believed that any good chef considered roux indispensable, “as indispensable to cooks as ink to writers.”

 Clarified butter which I learned that day what it was, is actually a process that helps you drain the milk out of the butter, you basically separate the fat and the milk. As wikipedia says: 

"Is milk fat rendered from butter to separate the milk solids and water from the butterfat. Typically, it is produced by melting butter and allowing the different components to separate by density. The water evaporates, some solids float to the surface and are skimmed off, and the remainder of the milk solids sink to the bottom and are left behind when the butter fat (which would then be on top) is poured off."

After learning what clarified butter was, we started making the roux, there are 3 types of roux, the white, the blond and the brown. Depending on what type of sauce you want to cook, that’s the type of roux you’ll make.

The roux is made 50% Fat, 50% Flour, Therefore, 1 pound of Roux is enough to thicken 1 gallon of Milk. 

For Bechamel, it has to be of course, White roux, and the colour of the roux will depend on the time you cook it, brown roux for example, which is what you use for Velute sauce has to be in the fire until it practically burns and start smelling like peanut butter. 

 Onion pique is the most fantastic thing, My grandma is gonna be so happy from now on, back in Venezuela, most people use chopped Onions to flavor bechamel, so I never used it before. it is a half of an onion sliced a bit on the side , so a bay leaf can be placed and 1 clove buried on the other side, this is use to flavor the milk of the béchamel before adding the Roux. It’s a very professionally gourmet way of flavoring a sauce gently.

To end here's a brief review of the use of each sauce:

Bechamel: s one of the mother sauces of French cuisine and is used in many recipes of Italian cuisine, for example lasagne. It is used as the base for other sauces (such as Mornay sauce, which is Béchamel with cheese).

Hollandaise:  is an emulsion of egg yolk and butter, usually seasoned with lemon juice, salt, and a little white pepper or cayenne pepper. Hollandaise sauce is well known as a key ingredient of eggs Benedict. 

 This classic Tomate Sauce It's also the starting point for making the traditional Spanish sauce, Creole sauce, Portuguese sauce or Provençale sauce.It is similar to, but more complicated than, the basic tomato sauce that is commonly served with pasta. Some versions of this tomate sauce recipe use a roux to thicken the sauce, but this isn't really necessary. The tomatoes themselves are enough to thicken the sauce.

Spangnole: Espagnole has a strong taste and is rarely used directly on food. As a mother sauce, however, it serves as the starting point for many derivatives, such as Sauce Africaine, Sauce Bigarade, Sauce Bourguignonne, Sauce aux Champignons, Sauce charcutière, Sauce Chasseur, Sauce Chevreuil and Demi-glace. 

Velute:  In preparing a velouté sauce, a light stock, such as chicken, veal or fish stock, is thickened with a blond roux.  A light chicken, veal, or fish stock, and salt and pepper for seasoning. Commonly the sauce produced will be referred to by the type of stock used e.g. chicken veloute, for example is made out of Chicken Stock.

As usual we cooked dinner by the end of the class, Mac and Cheese the first day and Pizza the second day.. using of course the sauces we previously prepared, in this case; Bechamel and Classic Tomato.