The Structure of Sauces

The major sauces we consider here are made of three kinds of ingredients:

1. A liquid, the body of the sauce

2. A thickening agent

3. Additional seasoning and flavoring ingredients

To understand sauce-making, you must first learn how to prepare these components and then how to combine them into finished sauces.

THICKENING AGENTS

A sauce must be thick enough to cling lightly to the food. Otherwise, it will just run off and lie in a puddle in the plate. This doesn’t mean it should be heavy and pasty. Chefs use the term nappé (nap pay; from the French napper, meaning “to top”) to describe the texture of a sauce that has the right texture to coat foods.

Starches are still the most commonly used thickening agents, although they are used less often than in the past. We discuss starches and other thickening agents in detail below.

OTHER FLAVORING INGREDIENTS

Although the liquid that makes up the bulk of the sauce provides the basic flavor, other ingredients are added to make variations on the basic themes and to give a finished character to the sauces.

Adding specified flavoring ingredients to basic sauces is the key to the catalog of classic sauces. Most of the hundreds of sauces listed in the standard repertoires are made by adding one or more flavoring ingredients to one of the five basic sauces or leading sauces.

As in all of cooking, sauce-making is largely a matter of learning a few building blocks and then building with them.

Roux

Starches as Thickeners

1. Starches are the most common and most useful thickeners for sauce-making. Flour is the principal starch used. Others available to the chef include cornstarch, arrowroot, waxy maize, instant or pregelatinized starch, bread crumbs, and other vegetable and grain products, like potato starch and rice flour. These are discussed later.

2. Starches thicken by gelatinization, which, as discussed in Chapter 4, is the process by which starch granules absorb water and swell to many times their original size.

Another important point made in Chapter 4 is that acids inhibit gelatinization.

Whenever possible, do not add acid ingredients to sauces until the starch has fully gelatinized.

3. Starch granules must be separated before heating in liquid to avoid lumping. If granules are not separated, lumping occurs because the starch on the outside of the lump quickly gelatinizes into a coating that prevents the liquid from reaching the starch inside.

Starch granules are separated in two ways:

• Mixing the starch with fat. This is the principle of the roux, which we discuss now, and of beurre manié, which is discussed in the next section.

• Mixing the starch with a cold liquid. This is the principle used for starches such as cornstarch. It can also be used with flour, but, as we note later, the result is an inferior sauce. A mixture of raw starch and cold liquid is called a slurry.

FINISHING TECHNIQUES

Remember that the three basic elements of a finished sauce are a liquid, a thickening agent, and additional seasoning and flavoring ingredients. We have discussed in detail how liquidsare combined with thickening agents to make the basic sauces. In the next section, we look at the way families of sauces are built on these bases by the addition of flavoring ingredients.

Sauces may be modified or added to in a great many ways. Among these methods are a number of basic techniques used over and over again for making sauces. Before we study the structure of the sauce families, it will be helpful to look at these basic finishingtechniques.

Reduction

1. Using reduction to concentrate basic flavors.

If we simmer a sauce for a long time, some of the water evaporates. The sauce becomes more concentrated, and the resulting product is more flavorful. This is the same technique used when making glazes from stocks. Some reduction takes place in nearly all sauces, depending on how long they are simmered.

2. Using reduction to adjust textures.

Concentrating a sauce by reduction also thickens it because only the water evaporates, not the roux or other solids. A skilled sauce chef uses both reduction and dilution to give a sauce the precise texture sought. If a sauce is too thin, it may be simmered until it reaches desired thickness. Or the chef may add a large quantity of stock or other liquid to a thickened sauce to thin it out greatly, then simmer it again until it is reduced to just the right consistency. By doing this, the chef also gives more flavor to the sauce.

3. Using reduction to add new flavors.

If we can add a liquid to a sauce, then reduce it to concentrate it, why can’t we reduce a liquid first and then add it to a sauce?

Enriching with Butter and Cream

1. Liaison.

In addition to being a thickening agent, a liaison of egg yolks and cream is used to finish a sauce by giving it extra richness and smoothness.

2. Heavy cream.

Heavy cream has long been used to give flavor and richness to sauces. The most obvious example is adding cream to basic béchamel sauce to make cream sauce.

3. Butter.

A useful enriching technique, both in classical and in modern cooking, is called finishing with butter, or monter au beurre (mohn tay oh burr).

To finish a sauce with butter, simply add a few pieces of softened butter to the hot sauce and swirl them in until melted. The sauce should then be served immediately; if it is allowed to stand, the butter may separate.

Finishing a sauce with butter gives it a little extra shine and smoothness as well as adding to it the rich, fresh taste of raw butter.

Seasoning

Whether or not a sauce is to be given a final enrichment of liaison, cream, or butter, it must be checked carefully for seasonings before serving. Remember that the last step in any recipe, whether written or not, is “adjust the seasonings.”

1. Salt is the most important seasoning for sauces. Lemon juice is also important. These two seasonings emphasize the flavors already present by stimulating the taste buds.

Cayenne and white pepper are perhaps third and fourth in importance.

2. Sherry and Madeira are frequently used as final flavorings. These wines are added at the end of cooking (unlike red and white table wines, which must be cooked in a sauce) because their flavors are easily evaporated by heat.

Sauce Families

Leading Sauces

One more time, let’s look at the three basic building blocks of sauce cookery, this time from a slightly different angle. liquid + thickening agent = leading sauce leading sauce + additional flavorings = small sauce

We have talked about five basic liquids for sauces: milk, white stock, brown stock, tomato purée (plus stock), and clarified butter. From these we get our five leading sauces, also known as grand sauces or mother sauces

Small Sauces

The major leading sauces—béchamel; veal, chicken, and fish veloutés; and espagnole—are rarely used by themselves as sauces. They are more important as the bases for other sauces, called small sauces. Tomato sauce and hollandaise are used as they are, but they, too, are important as bases for small sauces.

1. Secondary leading white sauces.

These three sauces—allemande, suprême, and white wine—are really finished sauces, like other small sauces. But they are used so often to build other small sauces that they rate a special category.

For example, to make suprême sauce, you add cream to chicken velouté.

To make Albufera sauce, you can add meat glaze (glace de viande) to your supreme sauce. Or, if you don’t have suprême sauce, you can make it by adding both cream and meat glaze to chicken velouté. This is why there are two sets of arrows in the chart.

Allemande, suprême, and white wine sauces are also known as the main small sauces. If the concept of secondary leading white sauces seems confusing at first, you may simply think of them as small sauces. The important thing is to understand how the sauces are derived.

2. Demi-glace.

• Demi-glace is defined as half brown sauce plus half brown stock, reduced by half.

Most chefs prefer demi-glace to espagnole as a base for small sauces because of its more concentrated, more fully developed flavor.

Note: It is possible to make small sauces directly from espagnole, but they will not be as fine.

• Some modern chefs feel espagnole is too heavy for modern tastes and that lighter sauces are required. These chefs prepare demi-glace from fond lié by reducing it with mirepoix, white wine, and seasonings, or by simply reducing by half a flavorful brown stock. In other words, demi-glace may be considered a well-flavored brown stock, reduced by half (demi means “half”), thickened with roux or other starch, or left unthickened (except by natural gelatin).

3. Small sauces listed twice.

Notice, for example, that mushroom sauce is listed under both chicken velouté and fish velouté. This means you should use the stock of the product you are serving with the sauce. Mushroom sauce for chicken should be made with chicken velouté, for fish, with fish velouté. To be even more confusing, mushroom sauce is also made with brown sauce. Bercy sauce is also made as both a white and a brown sauce. These are considered unrelated sauces that happen to have the same name.

4. Hollandaise and béarnaise.

These are essentially two variations of the same kind of sauce, with different flavorings.

Each has its own small family of small sauces.