The Saucier · Sauce
Sauce Velouté
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 50g butter + 50g flour, blond roux this time
- 700ml excellent chicken, fish, or veal stock, warm: the stock IS the sauce; this mother has no makeup
- Mushroom trimmings and a parsley stem if they are near
- Salt, white pepper, squeeze of lemon
- Mother #2, and the gateway to suprême, allemande, bercy, and every 'pan sauce' instinct
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesReducing a sauceMaking a rouxSkimming: foam, fat and a clear broth
The words inside
Mother Sauce Fish Stock: FumetReduction, Nappe & MountingThe Nutty RegisterMushroom Field Guide
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cook the roux 3–4 min to pale straw, blond, nutty, still light. 4 min
- Warm stock in stages, whisking; simmer 15–20 min, skimming the skin that rises (dépouillage, the old discipline). 20 min
- It should coat a spoon and hold a drawn line (nappe).
- Season late: the stock reduces and concentrates. Finish with lemon; add cream and it becomes sauce suprême.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Making a roux 32 recipes
- Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
- It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
- No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
- Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.
Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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