Cooking competencies 101: Sauce, gravies and Mother Sauces

As I delve into the instructional side of the culinary arts, with my intrepid seven-year-old apprentice at my side eager to learn, or at least to wield tools of the trade, I thought I'd open up a thread or three on the basics.

Research on the mother sauces invariably leads back to Escoffier, who updated the famous cook Careme's four sauces into BETH V or:
B for Béchamel
E for Espagnole or Brown Sauce
T for Tomato Sauce
H for Hollandaise and
V for Veloute

While these sauces sound teriffically difficult, many home cooks use a modified version of them on a regular basis - for instance, roux-based sauces are common in the home kitchen: Espagnole, from what I can gather, is basically gravy (please don't rend your hair, chefs - depending on your definition of gravy; yes, Espagnole is a roux-thickened veggie-fortified stock; at least a kissing cousin of a good pan gravy) Bechamel we all know as white sauce or cream gravy, and appears, slightly modified, in homemade mac-n-cheese and alfredo sauces. Veloute, the base of my beloved Turkey Tetrazzini, also often a regular contributor to Thanksgiving as gravy. Really, a blond roux is about as easy as it gets, especially if you cheat with superfine flour - equal parts of thoroughly blended flour and fat, sizzled until fragrant, and a hot liquid is whisked in and heated until thickened. 1 tbsp of roux will thicken about 1 cup of liquid; sauces involving dairy can be a little tricky (keep the heat slow) but once you get some successes under your belt, it's pretty easy.

Of all these sauces, it's the egg emulsions that seem to be out of favor: while I've been known to make my own hollandaise or sabayon, I find the process of separating eggs and then figuring out what to do with the leftover whites to annoyingly wasteful to be something I practice on a regular basis. They are, indeed, extremely easy to break (I'm planning a lesson on broken sauces with Sparky) and tough to thicken properly, but sometimes nothing but real hollandaise will do.

There are a couple other sauces every cook ought to know about: Escoffier neglects reductions and jus, which is what I grew up with: my mother always threw wine into the hot pan after cooking steaks, and the resulting wine-y, fond-y jus was our version of gravy. It wasn't until I discovered that the rest of the world added flour to the fat before adding liquid that I started making traditional gravies. Another good one is the blended sauce: tossing everything from the bottom of your roasting pan into an immersion blender gets you something that's not quite a brown sauce, especially if you have lots and lots of root vegetables as your thickener. There's a whole world of other sauces Escoffier didn't deign to notice: chutneys and other fruit-vegetable composites like steak sauce and ketchup, viniagrettes and finishing sauces like gremolatas and composite butters, but it's amazing what a little sauce competency can do for your cooking - sauces can elevate the most humble of meals.

I should follow this with a recipe, but I'm out of time right now - so I leave this thread in the competent hands of my fellow LTHers.

Great info, don't suppose you know of a book out there that would hold us by the hand and walk us through......or even better a local class.

Mhays wrote:...Bechamel we all know as white sauce or cream gravy, and appears, slightly modified, in homemade mac-n-cheese and alfredo sauces...

No.

Alfredo sauce -- real Alfredo sauce -- is not a bechamel. It has no roux in it, and is merely butter and cream reduced slightly, and cheese, flavored only with a little pepper and nutmeg beyond the dairy.

Sadly, many of us are subjected to bland starchy white sauces that are labeled as Alfredo.


Michael Ruhlman's "The Elements of Cooking" (isbn 978-0-7432-9978-7 HC $24) has a six page essay on sauce, and calls it "any seasoned fat, acid, cooking liquid, juice, plant puree or combination thereof, that we add to a main ingredient to enhance it, and it's helpful to the cook to think of it in this fundamental way." He's liberal in his definition -- a pat of butter on a steak is a sauce, and "creme brulee is in effect nothing more than a seasoned dessert sauce cooked to set the proteins."

He divides sauces into stock-based (B, E and V above -- assuming Milk is basically a stock), fat-based (H) and plant-based (T). The rest of the book, an exhaustive alphabetical cooking glossary, has a lot of details on what each kind of sauce is made of, but not specific recipes.

Mhays wrote:Of all these sauces, it's the egg emulsions that seem to be out of favor: while I've been known to make my own hollandaise or sabayon, I find the process of separating eggs and then figuring out what to do with the leftover whites to annoyingly wasteful to be something I practice on a regular basis. They are, indeed, extremely easy to break (I'm planning a lesson on broken sauces with Sparky) and tough to thicken properly, but sometimes nothing but real hollandaise will do.

On the subject of basics, I do wonder how much it's necessary to take what might be termed the desert-island approach to teaching (this is how you'd make this if you were on a desert island with only a whisk and a knife) and how much you can just take for granted that every modern cook is going to have access to electrical appliances.

In theory, I know how to make hollandaise the old-fashioned way, but it's been years since I've tried. I always make it in a blender, after melting the butter in the microwave. That turns it into a fast, easy recipe that never breaks: Never-fail hollandaise sauce

As for what to do with the leftover egg whites, well, what I usually do is stick them in a covered container in the fridge, thinking I'll figure out something to do with them later, and then, when I discover them a week or so afterwards, throw them away.

The sauces I make most often are simple pan reductions and butter sauces such as brown butter and beurre blanc, also not accounted for in the BETH V heirarchy. And pestos -- which I also make in the blender or food processor.

JoelF wrote:

Mhays wrote:...Bechamel we all know as white sauce or cream gravy, and appears, slightly modified, in homemade mac-n-cheese and alfredo sauces...

No.

Alfredo sauce -- real Alfredo sauce -- is not a bechamel. It has no roux in it, and is merely butter and cream reduced slightly, and cheese, flavored only with a little pepper and nutmeg beyond the dairy.

Sadly, many of us are subjected to bland starchy white sauces that are labeled as Alfredo.
.

I don't know what you mean by "real Alfredo sauce," but if you mean the stuff that's named after a Roman chef's early 20th century creation for his pregnant wife, your recipe is not an accurate description. His stuff was simply butter and cheese - no cream at all. But since no one in Italy really calls this simple conconction "Alfredo sauce," perhaps you mean the popularized (and usually gross) American Olive Garden-type stuff.

LAZ wrote:

Mhays wrote:
As for what to do with the leftover egg whites, well, what I usually do is stick them in a covered container in the fridge, thinking I'll figure out something to do with them later, and then, when I discover them a week or so afterwards, throw them away.

you are not alone!

Kennyz wrote:

JoelF wrote:Alfredo sauce -- real Alfredo sauce -- is not a bechamel. It has no roux in it, and is merely butter and cream reduced slightly, and cheese, flavored only with a little pepper and nutmeg beyond the dairy...

I don't know what you mean by "real Alfredo sauce," but if you mean the stuff that's named after a Roman chef's early 20th century creation for his pregnant wife, your recipe is not an accurate description. His stuff was simply butter and cheese - no cream at all...

My recipe comes straight from Marcella Hazan's "The Classic Italian Cookbook", and a beefed-up-on-parmesan adaptation of it can be found here (search for Hazan on the page) -- he uses 1 cup versus Hazan's 2/3, but one of my all-time recipe pet peeves is the use of volume instead of weight for grated cheese, so it could be the same amount anyway, depending on the type of grater.

But cream, butter, Parmesan (that's what the book says, in 1976 not many people used the term Parmigiano Reggiano), salt, pepper, nutmeg, fresh pasta.

The Wikibooks version has a very similar recipe, nearly doubled from Hazan's (and uses weight for the cheese).

I do have a link from MSNBC which claims to have the recipe from Alfredo's of Rome, which is just butter and Parmigiano Reggiano, so I'll grant you that.

But my (Hazan's) version certainly isn't the Olive Garden glop laden with garlic, flour, seafood or chicken, etc.

I don't doubt that Hazan's recipe is tasty, and nothing like Olive Garden's. I would by no means consider it "real," authentic," or anything like that, however. I don't think Hazan would claim that it is, either.

I do have a link from MSNBC which claims to have the recipe from Alfredo's of Rome, which is just butter and Parmigiano Reggiano, so I'll grant you that.

While walking around in Rome, looking at menus, I can't tell you how many restaurants claimed to be the "real" birthplace of fettucine Alfredo.

tcdup wrote:

I do have a link from MSNBC which claims to have the recipe from Alfredo's of Rome, which is just butter and Parmigiano Reggiano, so I'll grant you that.

While walking around in Rome, looking at menus, I can't tell you how many restaurants claimed to be the "real" birthplace of fettucine Alfredo.

and I'd bet not a single one of those claims was written in Italian. Romans know what Fettucine Alfredo is only because American tourists ask for it.

mhill95149 wrote:

LAZ wrote:

Mhays wrote:
As for what to do with the leftover egg whites, well, what I usually do is stick them in a covered container in the fridge, thinking I'll figure out something to do with them later, and then, when I discover them a week or so afterwards, throw them away.

you are not alone!

(I made a charlotte with genoise and a 8-yolk bavarian for a Memorial Day picnic. Snuck a few into Sparky's scrambled eggs, but I swear they're like the pot of porridge that won't turn off in the fairytale. )

And LAZ, if the jar next to it looks familiar, it's your jealously guarded Lemon-bourbon salad dressing, which remains delicious, we had it on this last night:

LAZ wrote:As for what to do with the leftover egg whites, well, what I usually do is stick them in a covered container in the fridge, thinking I'll figure out something to do with them later, and then, when I discover them a week or so afterwards, throw them away.

mhill95149 wrote:you are not alone!

Mhays wrote: (I made a charlotte with genoise and a 8-yolk bavarian for a Memorial Day picnic. Snuck a few into Sparky's scrambled eggs, but I swear they're like the pot of porridge that won't turn off in the fairytale. )

And LAZ, if the jar next to it looks familiar, it's your jealously guarded Lemon-bourbon salad dressing, which remains delicious

Glad you're enjoying it. That reminds me that one thing you can do with egg whites is make candied nuts. I made a simpler version with butter for the original Derby Day occasion of the lemon-bourbon dressing, but a longer keeping version calls for coating the nuts with egg white instead.

Great thread!

I do like René Verdon's treatment/breakdown of the mother sauces and sauces in
French Cooking for the American Table [ISBN: 978-0385087025] (I think I have a later edition than this one that shows up on amazon)

Another great reference book that I only made one gigantic batch of stock (and many inspired sauces) from is
The Saucier's Apprentice
by Raymond Sokolov
ISBN: 978-0394489209 Amazon link
If you are a stickler and have lots of patience - I highly recommend it.

Here's another book that I've found handy - (though I don't use it much; typically yolks go into lemon curd and mayo while whites end up in angel-food cake):
The Other Half of the Egg: Or, 180 Ways to Use Up Extra Yolks or Whites
by Helen McCully, Jacques Pépin, William North Jayme
ISBN: 978-0688001261
Amazon link

davecamaro1994 wrote:Great info, don't suppose you know of a book out there that would hold us by the hand and walk us through......or even better a local class.

For books, give James Peterson's "Sauces" a look over.

http://www.amazon.com/Sauces-Classical- ... 378&sr=1-1

but do you use a blonde roux or a brown roux in your brown sauce ? <asks Ruhlman>

davecamaro1994 wrote:Great info, don't suppose you know of a book out there that would hold us by the hand and walk us through......or even better a local class.

Dave, I do plan to do a walk-through of Sparky's mac-n-cheese class, but I did a bit of googling and found this. If you scroll through the images, you'll get a pretty good idea of the basic steps to a bechamel - which really is pretty easy. I also found this page on the science behind thickening sauces; the principles are helpful to know.

To flesh out the pictures, start with 2 tbsp fat in the pan of your choice on medium heat - if it's butter, you want to cook it for a few seconds to melt and then sizzle out some of the moisture. Add 2 tbsp white flour, and cook until it colors a bit like shown in the first picture and smells nutty (I usually use the whisk for the whole process and it's even easier if you use something like Wondra that doesn't tend to lump) Add 1 cup of milk or cream, and whisk like crazy to make sure all the flour is incorporated and there are no lumps. Heat carefully (don't turn your back on it) whisking all the while until it thickens, which will happen very suddenly (and, don't be alarmed, not necessarily evenly, which is why you are whisking) as it reaches boiling to make a thick sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper. The first picture shows what to do in the worst-case scenario: sieving a lumpy bechamel - even if you do it wrong, all is not lost, as long as you don't burn it. I suppose the enemy of a good roux-based sauce is having moisture in your flour before it hits the fat; this is the primary cause of the dreaded lumpy sauce. (to be totally honest, here - I measure only if I'm making a cheese sauce or a souffle. I usually toss equal parts of fat and flour in a pan and add liquid until it "looks right" and that works for me. Sauces are not as exacting as recipes would imply)

Country gravy (for biscuits) is exactly the same, except you start with crumbled sausage and cook it until you can use the rendered sausage as your fat, and leaving the sausage lumps in the pan to flavor the sauce. Pan gravy uses the same principle, except you're using the fat left over from roasting or searing whatever (first boiling off any remaining moisture before you add flour) and probably using stock or wine or flavorful liquid instead of milk or cream.

Where the roux-based sauces get tricky is when you start messing with the milk: hot milk really wants to become cottage cheese. Therefore, be very careful about adding anything even remotely acid to a milk-based sauce: cheese, yogurt, lemon, wine, even some pan juices and vegetables will "break" your sauce. You have to add this stuff carefully and off the heat, and make sure your sauce isn't boiling, otherwise you wind up with an ugly mess of curds and whey.

One thing I've found helpful when making a sauce by adding stock to a roux, is to have the liquid quite hot. I won't swear this is true, but it seems to me that I get many fewer lumps with warm stock than with cold.

Geo

Geo wrote:One thing I've found helpful when making a sauce by adding stock to a roux, is to have the liquid quite hot. I won't swear this is true, but it seems to me that I get many fewer lumps with warm stock than with cold.

Geo

I'll happily second Geo here - warm liquids definitely cuts down on risk for lumps. I'll make bechamel while stirring with simply a wooden spoon if my milk is warm whereas I'll use a whisk if my milk is cold. Both ways generally work out fine but warm stock cuts down on the risk.

Saveur has an article on Mother Sauces this month; unfortunately, the website links to a few of the recipes but doesn't link to the article, which has a lot of background information.

My early mentor in all things culinary had one of the various 'mother' books on such things and one of our private jokes came from a reference to "left over veal roasting liquid" which one of the recipes assumed one had a few cups of lying around just waiting to be used up.
Any time we encountered the blithe assumption of some exotic or highly involved, time-intensive preparation as merely the building block for a dish, someone would always add, "and of course, 1/3 cup of veal roasting juice."

When I first replied to this upstream, I hadn't yet read Ruhlman's "Elements of Cooking" which has a nice lengthy essay on sauces and a recipe for veal stock (its only recipe, by the way).

By modern standards, the difference between B, E and V is kind of thin: They're all starch-thickened sauces, with milk, veal stock and fish/poultry respectively as the basic volume. Your standard Chinese brown sauce fits this model.

H is egg-thickened, T is tomato-based and could probably be broadened to various fruit and vegetable-based sauces such as red pepper couli, baba ganouj, mango puree, etc.

That still leaves a number of sauces that aren't covered by our flexible BETH V. For one, nut- and seed-thickened based sauces such as mole, pipian, Spanish almond sauce, and a number of Indian cashew- and almond-based ones.

Hmm... what about bean-based sauces? We might call those starches, perhaps seeds.

Another would be onion-based sauces such as Murgh Do-pieza, where the sauce consists mostly of onions cooked long enough to dissolve into a thick mass. A T-sauce? Maybe, if we want to stretch the category.

We probably need sugar syrups in there somewhere -- enough SE Asian sauces would fit that model, and you could lump caramel, butterscotch, chocolate sauce, etc. (or is that latter a Nut sauce?).

Does this classification make Pasta Carbonara an H-sauce? Probably. What about Alfredo? I'm tempted to call it B, just for the dairy, but it truly isn't starch-thickened (except for residual from the pasta). It's thickened from the cheese and butter alone, and delicately handled so it doesn't separate.

I know, let's ask Homaru Canto or Grant Achatz! They'll make a sauce out of anything!

You're completely right, Joel - I was thinking myself that there's no room in this set of definitions for a beurre blanc, a jus, a reduction, a mignonette, or even a viniagrette - all of which could be classified as sauces. It's a pretty narrow definition of sauce, but I have to admit, the principles of the mother sauces are some big guns in my culinary arsenal.

Jean-Georges is famous for recipes that taste bold and complex, yet turn out to be made from the simplest ingredients and techniques. In one dish that's been on his flagship restaurant's menu since its inception, he plates seared scallops atop a pale-ish green sauce that tastes herbaceous, mustardy, sweet, sour and more. It's a justifiably sought-after dish. Turns out nothing could be simpler to make at home. J-G's famous pale green sauce is simply a puree of jarred capers and golden raisins. You take equal parts capers and raisins and barely cover them water. Bring it to a simmer then let it sit until the raisins are nice and plump. Dump it into a blender and puree. Season if needed/ desired with salt, pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg. That's it! And you can make it well in advance and heat for service too. He adds a dash of vinegar too, but I did not think that was necessary. I served this fantastic sauce last night with seared salmon.