Sauced!

Last week was a double header at COOK Masters program, and though I am still reeling from the whirlwind bread baking class that James Barrett from Metropolitan Bakery miraculously crammed into two hours, The Sauce class left me giddy and literally sauced (and not in a Chris Christie kind of way).  The class was led by the charming Peter Woolsey, owner of Bistro La Minette, and with Peter we went on a tour of modern sauces so good if I could have gotten everyone to look away I would have consumed them all with a spoon.  

I love sauces, I started my own sauce ‘career’ back in high school, looking for more… I didn’t grow up with gravy, we had it twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Passover, the rest of the time we used whatever was left in the pan, after the fat was skimmed.  But, the same people—my parents, who didn’t serve us sauces and gravies at home, took us to restaurants where there were sauces!  To me sauce was what differentiated home cooking from restaurant dining!  I started simple with white sauce, I think I probably got the recipe from The Joy of Cooking, I was astonished to watch the thin liquid slowly thicken, and I was hooked.

In culinary school we were taught what are called the Mother Sauces: Béchamel,Demi-glace, Velouté, Tomato and Hollandaise, called the mother sauces, or grand sauces, because they are the basis for most every other sauce. These sauces were part of a cuisine and service that hardly exists anymore, when tableside plating and saucing took place. These sauces and their “offspring” are still in use, but thanks to Nouvelle Cuisine, we live in a world of lighter, modern, contemporary sauces, and this is what we spent our time on with Peter.

We started calmly talking about sauces and their history, and watched as the intensity and activity built, Peter steadily adding pot after pot, to the various burners, and finishing with an array of sauces to taste and marvel over, and a kitchen that looked like a tornado had blown through!

 From Left to right: Hollandaise prep, consommé, melted butter for beurre blanc and hollandaise, making chicken stock

As he talked about food, and life and sauces and family, Peter got an onion brulée going, browned some chicken and cut up mirepoix for the rich chicken stock he made for a luscious sauce, ground up some chicken and egg whites to clarify some of the chicken stock, made both a hollandaise and a beurre blanc and browned some chicken for us to dip in the sauces, all of which were sublime.  He made it look so easy and effortless.  As he worked he quizzed us a bit on what went into the different sauces, I was surprised by both what I was able to easily recall as well as how much I forgotten.

This class was so much fun, I wish you could have been there with me!  I certainly left feeling braver about tackling hollandaise —a sauce I often avoid due to a combination of laziness and worry about scrambling the eggs… And the beurre blanc, so simple and so good, even now, days later I am thinking about it.  More than any other class yet, this one has really inspired me.  No recipes today, but I will post them later this week.