Mother Sauces: Sauce Béchamel and Sauce Velouté

Life has been busy lately. I have to work pretty much constantly if I hope to earn my Master's degree before heading out for VORTEX-II next summer. A "day off" means a day where I only work three hours rather than the 7-10 hours I normally work in a day. My cooking is restricted to a few easy dishes, except for last night and today. Last night we steamed a spaghetti squash and served it with a tomato sauce. It's a neat squash: cut it in half and scrape the insides with a fork to pull out strands of spaghetti-shaped vegetable matter with a hint of that winter squash flavor. Today I felt like making a treat, so we had Eggs Benedict for breakfast and Reuben sandwiches for lunch.

Now my computer is running a program that will take hours, and there's not a lot I can do until it is done, so I thought I'd continue with the mother sauces.

The first of the mother sauces is sauce béchamel. The basic recipe simply calls for milk, flour and butter. For most applications, I prefer making a slightly more elaborate version described in Joy of Cooking.

For one cup or so of sauce (which serves two to four people depending on how much sauce they like), combine 1-1/4 cups milk with about a quarter of a medium-sized white onion (chopped in big chunks), one or one and a half bay leaves, and a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg. Gently bring it to a simmer. Keep it on low or the low side of medium--heating too quickly will cause the milk to curdle. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Strain out the solid material so you have only the milk remaining. Oh, and do yourself a huge favor and take a taste of the flavor-infused milk. You will not regret it! Most of the flavor will be muted by the time the sauce is prepared, so don't wait until later to taste it. You'll want the milk to be hot when you add it, so either strain it right before adding it to the sauce, or return it to the saucepan or pot and put it on low heat. Probably best not to let it get to a simmer again.

Next prepare a roux. It's kind of hard to describe how to do this, and I recommend looking for a cooking video on-line for a demonstration. There's several on youtube. Good Eats does a good job describing this procedure in "Gravy Confidential." The short description is to start with equal volumes of butter and flour. Figure one tablespoon of each for a cup or so of sauce. Melt the butter in a saucepan (one with sloped edges is best, because you won't have to worry as much about thick solids getting stuck in corners) over medium-high heat until it foams. Then add the flour, all at once, and start whisking. You'll probably want to reduce the heat to medium or medium-low at this point. Keep whisking--make sure it is smooth. The roux molecules will reach out through liquid added to the sauce to thicken the entire mixture. Any lumpiness (insufficient mixing) in the roux will cause lumpiness in the sauce. For béchamel, we want a white roux. This means it is cooked just until the floury flavor is gone--there will be a slight nutty aroma. This should only take two or three minutes.

Now remove the roux, and let it cool some. Next add some hot milk (either the infusion, or plain milk that has been heated if you are not using the infusion)--just a few tablespoons, to the roux. Whisk the milk and the roux together until they are combined in a paste. Add a few more tablespoons of milk to make sure it combines easily. Now you can add as much milk at a time as you like. I advise adding most, but not all, of the milk--two thirds of a cup or so. Stir it with a wooden spoon over low heat, and don't let it get to a boil again. Heat it for about eight to ten minutes, adjusting the consistency by adding more milk. Be careful--it's much easier to thin a béchamel than to thicken it. Add the milk carefully. Once you get the desired thickness, you'll want to add just a touch more milk just before serving. The sauce will thicken more as it cools, so have it just a touch too thin when you take it off the burner. Salt and pepper to taste.

This sauce can be served as is, but--as a person who delights in complicated tasks--it's more fun to make some daughter sauces!

For sauce mornay: This is a cheese sauce. Usually it is prepared with a quarter cup each of grated Gruyère and Parmesan cheese per cup of béchamel. The cheeses can be modified depending on how the sauce will be used. I often like to add a good cheddar, as well. Simply stir the cheeses into the mother sauce until they have just melted. Be careful not to cook it much longer, or the sauce might get stringy. This works great on sauteéd vegetables, as the base for a gratin, or as the cheese contribution to macaroni and cheese. I generally prefer making sauce mornay with just plain milk, not the flavor infusion described above.

For sauce soubise: Sweat half a pound (per cup béchamel) of finely sliced onions until they are soft, but don't let them brown. Add them to the mother sauce, cover, and cook over low heat for about half an hour. Works well on vegetable dishes, fish, lamb, and does okay with roasted chicken.

For sawmill gravy: Prepare the mother sauce with fat rendered from pork sausage, and use plain milk rather than the infusion. Add lots of pepper! Crumbled sausage can be mixed in to make a sausage gravy.

The highs are now generally in the 50s and low 60s (F) here, with nights now dipping into the 30s. We have not had our first frost yet, however the threat is enough that our plants are joining us indoors. Leaves are turning--a transformation that seemed to come on quite suddenly. I had not noticed any changes until last week, and now yellows and reds are being painted over the greens.

I'd like to get back into the habit of checking the weather--the models and the upper-air measurements and all that--every day. You'd be surprised how few meteorologists have much interest in the weather. I frequently lose track of what's going on in the atmosphere. I suppose this isn't too surprising--I'm mostly interested in severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, and in general prefer studying mesoscale phenomena (events that happen on the scale of about 1 - 100 km and last somewhere between an hour and a day). I confess that I am not that interested in synoptics--that's the scale of weather that happens over thousands of kilometers and lasts a week. Like frontal cyclones. Makes sense, I guess, since mesoscale meteorology is my field, after all.

Well, I don't have much more to write, so I should probably figure out something productive to do with my time as I wait for Matlab to finish making my graphs. My computer isn't frozen,(obviously) but every few minutes a graph pops up, and as long as Matlab is chugging away on these sizable files I don't want to open IDV.

Perhaps I'll have a glass of bourbon. A very fine bourbon--probably the finest I've ever had--was on sale last week so I picked up a bottle. I'm going through it a little quicker than I'd like, but hey, that's generally the case with me and alcohol.

.oOo.

Well, I have my bourbon, and I've decided that the most productive thing I could think to do is write up sauce velouté, the next of the mother sauces I'd like to share with y'all.

Velouté is made with a blond roux and white stock. "Blond" just means that the roux is cooked longer, about eight minutes or so, until it darkens some. Be careful not to burn it! White stock can mean chicken stock, fish stock, turkey stock, vegetable stock, or veal stock if you are into that sort of thing. (There's a cruelty-free veal producer near here that I've been curious to try...it is, of course, prohibitively expensive but I bet it's delicious!) Velouté derivatives are normally eaten with chicken or fish, and it's best to use chicken stock for chicken, fish stock for fish, etc. I also generally prefer to use some of the fat rendered from the meat for the roux. For example, if Andi is roasting a chicken, half an hour before the chicken will be ready I'll scoop out some of that delicious chicken fat for flavor.

To make one cup of velouté, first put about 1-3/4 cups of white stock in a saucepan and get it simmering. Next make a blond roux from a tablespoon and a half each of flour and fat (or butter). This sauce will reduce for awhile, and some of the roux will be destroyed. Thus we need slightly more to begin with. Add the stock in the same way as described above for milk. Bring it to a simmer, and reduce it over medium-low heat for about twenty minutes--until the sauce coats the back of a metal spoon.

An alternate method--one that I have not used--uses a white roux but reduces for an hour (over lower heat, naturally). Because I like to make my velouté from the chicken grease, in order for the sauce to be ready at the same time as the chicken, I have to use the shorter method.

The sauce could simply be finished with a tablespoon or so of butter and served, but it's not spectacular. Better to make the daughter sauces!

For sauce suprême: There's a couple of different ways of going about this. I'll first describe the tastier, but more time-consuming, one. Then the easier one that is still quite good, but not quite as good as the more difficult one (of course!).

James Peterson's textbook Sauces calls for "mushroom cooking liquid." This is made by simmering mushrooms in water. I have made this a few times, but in general I find the same effect can be reached by simmering the original stock to be used in the velouté with mushrooms for about fifteen or twenty minutes. Strain the stock to add it to the roux, and then you can either throw in the mushrooms at the end, or not. (I prefer having mushrooms in my sauce, for the most part.)

So, combine a cup of this mushroom-enhanced velouté with another cup of white stock, and a quarter cup of heavy cream. Reduce by about two-thirds, being careful not to let the sauce come to a full boil. Finish by whisking in a few tablespoons or so of butter and of heavy cream.

Now, this reduction is pretty time-consuming, and if you are preparing it with the chicken grease from the bird your partner is roasting, you will probably find yourself faced with an increasingly impatient partner as she or he waits half an hour or longer after the chicken is ready. For a quicker sauce suprême that will still make your partner praise your sauce-making prowess, add slightly less than half a cup of heavy creme to the a mushroom-enhanced velouté during the period of reduction. Finish with a tablespoon of butter and another of heavy cream.

For sauce aurore: Combine a cup of velouté with about a third of a cup of tomato puree. Adjust the consistency by either reducing or thinning with more white stock. Finish with a tablespoon or so of butter. A splash of white wine vinegar isn't a bad thing to throw in neither, but not necessary.

For sauce hongroise: Finely chop about a quarter of a large onion. Sweat it in butter, but don't let it brown. Add half a tablespoon of paprika (I like Hungarian paprika, but I think that's because I love the novel Dracula). Add a cup of velouté. The sauce can be thinned with white stock, milk, heavy cream, or a mixture thereof. Finish with a tablespoon of butter.

For sauce smitane: Sweat a handful of finely chopped onions in butter without browning. Add half a cup of dry white wine (I prefer sauvignon blanc, but chardonnay is also good and plain old dry vermouth will do in a pinch), reduce by half. Stir in one cup of velouté and simmer for about five minutes. Remove from heat and finish with half a cup of sour cream.

Anyone who knows their sauces will note the glaring omission of sauce allemande--a derivative of velouté that was considered a mother sauce in its own right a few centuries ago. I have only made allemande once or twice, and it did not turn out terribly well. I learned a lot, of course, but I haven't worked on this sauce enough to really get it. Perhaps later.

I do think I've written quite enough now, haven't I?

.oOo.

Oh, I almost forgot! I wanted to share a great recipe for a sauce bercy for white fish. This is technically a velouté derivative, but I only ever make it in this integral form.

Preheat your oven to 400F. Sprinkle one medium shallot, finely chopped, and one tablespoon parsley, also finely chopped, over the bottom of a pan that can be in the oven or the stovetop (like a cast iron or carbon steel pan). Lay over the shallots and parsley three or four white fillets (like tilapia, cod, haddock or even catfish), white side up. They should completely cover the bottom of the pan and should not overlap. Season with salt and pepper, then pour a quarter cup of dry white wine and a quarter cup of fish stock over them. Cover loosely with aluminum foil. Heat on a stovetop on high until liquids simmer. Move the pan immediately to the oven. Cook the fish until done--this should not take more than ten minutes.

Remove the pan from the oven, remove the fish carefully and keep them warm. Place the pan on a stovetop, and reduce the liquid until it is slightly syrup-like. Whisk in an ounce of cold butter, and adjust seasonings. Serve the fish and the sauce.

This is simple, quick, and absolutely delicious. Be very careful not to overcook the fish, though! I tried to show this dish off to some friends in Austin, and overcooked the fish. Not only was the texture rubbery, but the water from the fish thinned out and ultimately broke the sauce. They were courteous enough to offer praise, but I was thoroughly embarrassed.