Cooking Basics #2

Sauces are F-ing Easy

As taught us by Mike C, the Kitchen Alchemist, a.k.a the Culinarian Barbarian of Kitchen on Fire in Berkeley, I will now teach you how to make sauces in one sentence:
Saute butter and then whisk in flour, once your flour molecules are all coated in fat, you are good to go and can slowly at first incorporate your liquid until you have a nice thickening sauce.
Booyah!!
So besides being a little bummed that I had to start this new blog because I was too dumb
to get on my old blog (cookingwillsaveyourlife@blogspot.com) I am pretty juiced after last night's sauce ho down. We made tons of them. Veloute. Buerre Blanc. Espanole. Bechamel. Then offshoots of these "Mother"sauces like mushroom sauce, and cheese sauce. We did Hollandaise two ways, one over a water bath and one "Rambo Style" just holding a metal bowl over the burner. We did cold sauces, Aioli, Pesto, Red Pepper Coulis...
It's ALL ABOUT THE ROUX. Roux is just that paste you get when you saute a fat then whisk in the starch. There were about twenty people last night in the kitchen so it was a little hard to get in to do a sauce but I managed to do a "espanole." This one is the same deal except you saute some minced onion, carrot and celery with the butter before addong the flour...then you mix in some beef stock and tomato puree...
So easy it's boring me just to write about it!