Photo: Suzie Ridler/Flickr

Week VI: Sauces
(Read the whole series here: Intro; Week I: Knife Skills; Week II: Eggs; Week III: Soups and Stocks; Week IV: Moist Heat Cooking)

The “Back to Basics” series at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts ended for good this week on a very high and very delicious note: sauces. Sauces are the makers and breakers of meals, the notch kicker-upper, the thing that takes a piece of meat from bland and blah to really freakin’ good. Though they can be a little temperamental (more on that later) and surprisingly time-consuming, it’s well worth it.

Chef first gave us a rundown of the Mother Sauces: those that are egg-based (hollandaise and mayonnaise) and those that are roux-based (béchamel, velouté and espagnole). Once you’ve mastered these, you can make even more sauces by adding a few extra ingredients. For example, aioli sauce is just mayonnaise plus garlic, and sauce Robert is basically espagnole with shallots.

The dish I made incorporated a velouté sauce, which is a simple combination of butter, flour, chicken stock, and salt and pepper. I say simple, but, to be honest, it took two attempts to get it right.

I did as The Packet said, melting the butter, cooking the roux for three minutes, then adding the chicken stock, but what was supposed to be a thick, white sauce (after all, velouté comes from the French word velour, meaning velvety) was instead a yellow, watery substance with unappetizing flecks of flour. With one glance Chef told me the problem was that the flour had already hydrolyzed (meaning it’d broken down), which is why it wouldn’t come together to thicken up the sauce. Luckily, this happened in the earliest stages of the recipe, so there was time to fix it. Chef said I should once again melt the butter, immediately add the flour, and cook for only one minute on low heat.

And whaddaya know? Minutes later there was a creamy, thick sauce swirling around in the pot. The rest of the recipe was easy to follow, so it was with great pride that I put out my platter amongst the other dishes (my compatriots made fried calamari with aioli sauce, Eggs Benedict with asparagus and a chipotle-orange Hollandaise, poached salmon in a wine Court Bouillon, grilled tenderloin with sauce Robert, and poached pears with Crème Anglaise and caramel).

There have certainly been a number of these moments in the last six weeks, the ones where I’m beaming with pride and also a bit of astonishment. I’ve come to realize that cooking is not hard, and I shouldn’t be so easily intimidated by it (obviously I’m not talking Top Chef status, but you know what I mean). Indeed, I’ve braved the kitchen since the start of the series, and I’ve been a lot braver in the kitchen, moving beyond omelets and spaghetti.

To new cooks: it’s all about confidence, which comes from practice. Try a dish that you may have thought above your skill level, and you will be amazed to discover that it’s possible and probably not as difficult as you’d expected. The recipes I’ve put up during this series have been tried and tested by me, so anyone can do them. Really.

I may still fumble in the kitchen, but at least I’m finally in it.

I leave you with the recipe for the chicken dish I made in class, Chicken Supremes Allemande. It was super tasty, quick and simple (as long as you don’t fumble the velouté the first time). Stay hungry, and happy cooking!

Chicken Supremes Allemande
(Velouté)

6 TBS butter
4 whole chicken breasts, bone out and trimmed of skin and fat
Salt and white pepper
Juice of 1 lemon
3 TBS flour
2 cups warm chicken stock
2 large peppers, 1 red, 1 green, peeled and julienned (didn’t peel mine, no matter)
3 TBS Madeira
2 egg yolks
2/3 heavy cream

Preheat oven 400º

Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit a baking dish. With 1 TBS butter, grease the baking dish and 1 side of the parchment paper. Arrange the chicken breasts in the baking dish. Season with salt and pepper, sprinkle with lemon juice and cover with buttered parchment. Set aside.

In a sauce pot, melt 3 TBS butter. When the foam subsides, add the flour and cook the roux 3 minutes. Add the stock and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Let simmer 30 minutes, skimming as much as possible. (Me speaking: the recipe says cook the roux for 3 minutes, but don’t do that. That’s how I got the flaky, first attempt version of velouté. As soon as the butter melts, add the flour and cook over low heat for 1 minute. Then add the chicken stock. It’ll thicken up from there.)

Meanwhile, in another skillet, melt the remaining 2 TBS of butter and saute the peppers until soft yet crisp. Add 1 TBS of Madeira and season with salt and pepper.

Bake the chicken breasts for 10 minutes (I did 20, Chef’s orders). Meanwhile, season the velouté with salt and pepper. Make a liasion with the egg yolks and cream (a liasion is just a mix of egg and cream). Temper the liasion with some of the hot velouté before adding the two together. Stir in the remaining Madeira and 2/3 of the julienne peppers. Correct the seasoning, adding a squeeze of lemon juice.

Arrange the chicken breasts on a platter and ladle the sauce down the center and scatter the julienned pepper around the platter.

(Roberta L. Dowling © 2003)