Boeuf Bourguignon

Boeuf Bourguignon is a classic French beef stew (made famous here in America by French-trained American chef Julia Child) made with stock (this recipe can be modified to use beef bones instead of chicken, but the process is exactly the same), red wine, and onions. It's a great way to learn to be comfortable with braising, and an all-around great winter comfort food everyone should have in their arsenal of soups, stews, and braises. I have designed this recipe using chuck-- specifically a chuck roast. Chuck isn't really used for steaks per se (like the ribeye, filet, strip, etc.) because it's not really suited for that kind of cooking. Steaks are meant to be cooked relatively quickly over blisteringly high heat in a pan with oil or over a fire-- but without very many liquids. Chuck, on the other hand, is far too tough for this. You can either grind chuck (and combine it with brisket and short rib) for an excellent burger patty, or you can buy a whole roast like I recommend for this. If you buy the whole roast, follow the lines of fat and sinew present in the meat (a typical chuck roast weighs anywhere from 3 to 7 pounds; 4 pounds is ideal here) and cut along them. Then, progressively break down the meat into slightly larger than bite-sized cubes.

The reason chuck doesn't work well as a steak is twofold: first, because of the length and orientation of the muscle fibers, and second, because the muscle used to work literally 24/7 to support its entire weight when the animal was still living. The best steaks are from the muscles that barely do any work at all. Because the animal's shoulder supported so much weight for so long, chuck gets chewy if not tenderized mechanically (by grinding, as I mentioned RE: burgers) or by allowing it to cook at a low temperature for several hours, as I'll prescribe here in this recipe.

Peel and chop 1 pound of carrots, and peel and slice 4 large yellow onions into rings. Wash and slice 1 pound of white, crimini, portobello, or baby bella mushrooms. (A quick note to bouef bourguignon traditionalists: yes, I know I’m supposed to use pearl onions. But I don’t have the time or the patience—and you probably don’t either—to peel the requisite number of pearl onions. I would much rather do less work for the same results (peeling fewer regular onions for the same amount of usable onion) than more unnecessary work (peeling all the baby pearl onions when the big yellow ones work just as well). If you insist on using the smaller onions, go right ahead, but for your sake, I would make sure you buy pre-peeled (usually frozen) baby onions.)

Begin by seasoning the cut chuck with salt and freshly ground pepper and lightly dredge it in flour. Coat the bottom of a large pot or dutch oven with oil. Just before the oil begins to smoke, place the chuck in the pot and sear on all sides. Your objective is not to cook the chuck all the way through-- this wouldn't do that, anyways. You just want to get some color on it and to develop a "fond" (in the American sense, referring to the caramelized bits of flavorful goodness stuck to the pan that most home cooks throw away at their peril; the French use "fond" to mean "stock").

Cut several strips of bacon parallel to the short side of the bacon to create lardons. Lower the heat in the pan to medium-low to not burn the fond, add a touch more oil, and slowly render out the bacon. Reserve.

Saute the carrots and allow the onions to caramelize in the fat already in the pan from the beef and the bacon. This will create a little bit more fond in the bottom of the pan. Use bourbon, cognac, or another liquor (or more wine, if you don't have any liquor) to deglaze the pan. Once the fond has been picked up off the bottom of the pan, add 1 quart (4 cups) of chicken or beef stock, 2 cups of water, 1 bottle of red wine, and 1 can of tomato paste to the Dutch oven and reintroduce the seared beef.

Allow to braise, partially covered, for three hours at 275 Fahrenheit. Then serve alone, with egg noodles, with potatoes, or with your accompaniment of choice.

Polish Papal Cream Cake on St. John Paul II's feast day

Those of you who know me in real life know that, when Archbishop Gregory of Atlanta (now Cardinal Gregory of Washington) confirmed me on November 19, 2016, I took upon myself the name of Pope St. John Paul II, thus assuming him as a personal patron. Today is his feast day, so I thought this week’s recipe would be the “Polish Papal Cream Cake” (“Kremówka Papieska” in Polish) as it’s become in recent years—since people found out it was his favorite dessert. As a young boy, the young Karol Jr. (the future Pope) would get some money from his father (Karol Sr.) and go to the corner bakery after school to get some of this cake on a fairly regular basis. The affinity remained as he grew and became Fr. Karol, Bishop Wojtyla, Archbishop (and then Cardinal) Wojtyla, and Pope John Paul II.

For John Paul, connecting back to his Polish roots was his way of relaxing-- eating Polish food, watching Polish TV, reading Polish literature, speaking in Polish. No matter how long he was away from his homeland, he never lost that part of his identity, and always treasured the things that reminded him of where he had come from. 

I haven’t ever made this myself (but I remember having the idea but not being able to make this last year), but I have read a number of recipes, and this is my presentation of this one. 

This recipe begins with creating puff pastry. I have never made puff pastry, and that process is quite complicated and labor-intensive, so I’ll let Josh Weissman explain how to make it here. 

Once you have a completed pastry, move on to the cream. The first recipe I mentioned I would be going off of reminds us we have three crucial elements of mise en place (I’ve talked about this a lot in savory cooking, but of course, it’s just as important in sweet baking): (1) finding a bigger bowl than the one in which we’re mixing the cream and filling it with ice, (2) locating a fine-mesh strainer and (3) setting that strainer on top of a bowl about the same size as the original, in the ice inside the bigger bowl, to receive the contents of the mixing bowl. Hang on; this game of “musical chairs with bowls” will soon make more sense.

The recipe online says to “bring milk, sugar, vanilla, salt, cornstarch, and egg yolks to a boil, stirring constantly with a wire whisk. [My comment: you’re trying to create a custard cream, not a sweet take on scrambled eggs, so if you see little bits of egg yolk floating around, you’ve made an irrecoverable mistake and should throw everything away and start over. You want to pasteurize the yolks so they are safe, but you want to keep their creamy consistency] Keeping this mixture moving with a wire whisk by hand (since it’s so essential that this be done constantly) might get tiring, so I suggest using a hand-held mixer on low to medium-low speed, with a whisk beater instead of the traditional beater design. In a pinch, I suppose the traditional beater design might also work, but it’ll certainly incorporate less air into this mixture, so the risk that something will catch on the bottom and burn increases if you either don’t whisk by hand or use the mixer at a low speed with the right whisk attachment.

That online recipe then recommends switching to a wooden spoon to reach the corners and allowing everything to boil for another minute once everything has been incorporated thanks to the step above involving the whisk. Whether you switch implements, don’t allow anything to burn on the bottom or on the sides. Keep everything moving constantly. Once you’re satisfied with the cream, move it from the saucepan through the strainer into the small bowl about the size of the saucepan. The small bowl should be sitting on ice in a big bowl. According to the original recipe, the ice is only there to stop the cooking of the custard, not to chill it to room temperature or even further.

Then, according to the same recipe, assemble the cake first with one piece of puff pastry (you should divide your block of pastry made according to Josh’s recipe in half), then the cream, then the other piece, and chill in the fridge until set. The original recipe calls for a 13-by-9 pan, but I suppose any dimensions would work, as long as you make your pastry the right size for your pan and having more or less height than the original recipe assumes is acceptable to you.

Once the cake has chilled and set in the fridge overnight, dust with powdered sugar, cut into square portions, and serve.

To all of us under John Paul II's patronage, happy feast day! St. John Paul II, pray for us!

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment letting me know what you think!

Pico de Gallo

Chances are, you’ve been to a Mexican restaurant at least once; and if you have, I can virtually guarantee you’ve eaten and enjoyed the dish we’ll cover this week: salsa, specifically, pico de gallo. The world is your oyster when it comes to salsas. “Salsa” is literally “sauce” in Spanish, even though a salsa doesn’t look like what you probably imagine a sauce to be: a relatively thick, flavored liquid like the ones I covered in my recent Mother Sauces series.

A basic pico de gallo salsa contains a few basic elements: a tomato, something spicy, an onion, and something acidic. This is wonderful for new cooks who don’t have much experience handling ingredients or knives. Pico de gallo ingredients must be chopped by hand and not in a food processor or blender, so a pico is a simple and safe way to get plenty of practice holding and using a good chef’s knife.

Every new chef needs to learn to trust and respect his or her knives; they can be extremely helpful if you know how to use them, but you can’t be reckless with or around them. Knives also cannot do the impossible; if you ask of a knife something it cannot do, you may get seriously hurt. Be careful. There’s no harm or shame in being careful. I hurt myself peeling potatoes Christmas Eve 2020, so now, with no shame whatsoever, I wear Kevlar gloves when I work with vegetable peelers. This is perfectly fine. There is no shame in doing anything to keep yourself safe. Speed and precision like the chefs on TV or the internet will come, but before that, you must be safe. Prioritize safety above all else.

Knife safety comes in three parts. First, a dull knife is unsafe, and a sharp knife is safe. Use a honing rod and/or a whetstone on your knives every few weeks or months, depending on how often you use them. Keep them sharp, and they will keep you safe. High-quality knives and high-quality steels and/or stones can literally last long enough to become family generational heirlooms. Second, how you hold the knife. At some point, you’ll notice the blade and the handle meet. With the index finger and thumb of your dominant hand, pinch the knife at the blade at that point, and curl your three remaining fingers behind them on the handle. Hold the knife firmly, but you don’t need a tense “death grip” on it either. Be in control but stay relaxed. Controlled and relaxed is safe, controlled and tense is unsafe. Finally, how you hold the food. Always hold whatever you are cutting with your non-dominant hand, and hold your food with your dominant hand. Use what I call a “three-layer claw grip” to hold the food. As with the knife, be firm but be relaxed. Raise your non-dominant hand like you see people doing when they get sworn into office. Now, curl your fingers down so each one looks like it only has its first knuckle (the biggest one, closest to where each finger joins with the hand) still pointing up. Put your hand in this position flat on a table with the back of your hand facing up. Your palm should touch your table. Raise your palm slightly so your fingernails go from completely touching your table’s surface to being perpendicular to it. You now have a claw grip. Furthest out in front is the middle finger, then the index and ring fingers, then the thumb and pinky. Keeping your fingers curled like this is the safest way to hold the food so it doesn’t move while you’re cutting, and the best way to keep your fingers away from the action of the knife.

Find a few tomatoes on the vine, wash them, and pull them off the vine. Using a sharp knife and this claw grip, cut each tomato through its stem end (straight down through where the vine was attached). Turn each half of the tomato cut-side down (we always want to cut things with flat surfaces; this is why we cut two hemispheres, not one sphere, as much as possible). Now, find the stem end in the middle and cut directly through it, creating a left half and a right half. Cut each half in half along its long side once more. Now, turn your board 90 degrees, and cut parallel to the “short” side of these segments of tomato three or four times, depending on the size of the tomato and your skill with the knife. Repeat this with all your tomatoes. Once this is done, your tomatoes have been diced. Set them aside.

Now, dice a red onion. Onions have two ends: one is fuzzy, and that end will be called the “root end” from now on. The other end has some strands of onion peel coming up in a mass together. That end will be the “stem end” from now on. Find the middle of the onion, cutting it in two from stem to root. You should have a left half and a right half with otherwise intact stem-halves and root-halves. Lay each half flat on your board, and cut the stem end off, but LEAVE THE ROOT END INTACT OR THIS METHOD WILL NOT WORK. Peel away all the onion paper and the first layer of the onion. Rotate this stemless, peeled half-onion so that the stemless side faces you and the root half is facing away from you. Carefully place your knife parallel to your cutting surface and make 2 or three cuts. The onion should still be together, but now the half should have a “top third,” a “middle third,” and a “bottom third.” Now, starting very close to the root BUT NOT GOING THROUGH IT, cut down the length of the onion. Make as many or as few cuts as you like. For salsa, I usually make six to eight of these cuts, but for sauces like my variation of Sauce Tomate, I have made as many as 14 of these cuts. Turn the board 90 degrees and start making cuts from the stem side all the way until just before the root. Stop as close to the root as possible to minimize waste. Once you have done this to all the halves of all of your onions, they are ready.

Every pico has some kind of pepper. For those of you who like heat, follow these instructions on a jalapeno or your pepper of choice. If you want the mildest possible pico, use a bell pepper, either red or green. Cut off the top to remove the stem but cut close to the stem to minimize waste. If you find you cut off too much, then cut around the stem to save the flesh you cut off too. Cut along the length of the pepper. You should now have two long halves of peppers that should have lots of seeds and pith inside. Remove those, unless you have a hotter pepper and you want to keep them in deliberately, knowing that the pith is where most of the capsaicin (the chemical that makes spicy peppers spicy) is stored. The peppers so the skin is on the cutting board, and now cut along the length of each half-pepper to make sticks. Cut parallel to those sticks to dice the pepper. The spicier the pepper, the finer your dice should be.

Use a Microplane grater to zest as many limes as you would like—as many as you think you need to balance the heat from the peppers and the pungency of the onion. Be careful to only remove the colored zest with the grater, not the white pith. The zest has several aromatic flavoring oils. The pith, on the other hand, is extremely bitter and unpleasant.

If you want to add anything else to your salsa (I’ve seen salsas that include peaches, mangoes, pineapples, and other fruits), now would be a good time to cut them. I can’t possibly guess all the additions every reader would try in their salsa, so I won’t give specific instructions on how to cut any of them. But I will reiterate this: the general principles of creating flat surfaces as quickly as possible, using the claw grip, and cutting one axis (x, y, z) at a time of the cubes that make up dice are always good guidelines.

Under-seasoning food is probably the most common mistake home cooks make. Use the learning experience of making salsa to correct this. Add some salt and freshly ground pepper. Taste the salsa. See if it needs more salt, pepper, or more acidity from the lime. Compensate as necessary. Learning to taste food as it is being prepared, then adjusting the rest of the preparation based on the results of a tasting is an essential skill most home cooks don’t have. Learning this skill will immediately massively improve the taste of the food the average home-cook puts out, and it will also increase the motivation to cook, the desire to try new ingredients, and the willingness to experiment and rely less and less on recipes and more and more on intuition.

Garnish your salsa with chopped fresh herbs. Cilantro is perhaps the most “traditionally Mexican” herb in this context, but I know there is a not-so-insignificant population with a genetic trait that means they perceive cilantro as having a “soapy” taste. If you fall into this category, run your knife through a bunch of parsley a few times. If you don’t, and you like cilantro, use it instead. Serve.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

(Credit to Natasha's Kitchen)

Viral TikTok Tomato Feta Pasta

In February 2021, one recipe went so viral on “food TikTok” (not a separate app, just the section of the audiences/creators on TikTok whose content preferences revolve around food) that according to multiple sources there was a run on feta cheese in Finland because this recipe got so popular.

I am not usually up to date with what's trendy, and when I am, I don't usually care much, but this has been an exception. Of all the food-related topics to go viral, this is one of the few that has managed to do this because it is good (my family can attest to this flavor combination working remarkably well-- this is the crux of the flavor profile of one of our favorite pizzas), so it not only merits my attention but also my promotion.

Feta comes in a variety of textures and it can be made from a variety of kinds of milk (i.e., from different animals). Cow, sheep, and goat milk are all used for feta, but 70% sheep-30% goat is the most traditional. Feta’s texture depends on how long it ages, usually no less than 3 months. It is commonly sold either as a block or already crumbled. For this recipe, buy the highest-quality majority-sheep block feta you can find. As a second choice, if no sheep feta is available, go for goat feta, leaving cow feta only as a last resort. Whatever milk your feta is from, make sure to buy it as a block and not pre-crumbled.

Place the block of feta in the center of a baking dish and surround it with an equal amount of cherry tomatoes (1 pint). Drizzle olive oil over the cheese and tomatoes. Add freshly ground black pepper to taste. Do not add salt. (Traditionally made feta is already salty enough.) Place in a 400-degree oven for 25 minutes or until the feta melts and the tomatoes burst out of their skins, releasing their juices. While the feta is in the oven, bring 1 gallon of water to a boil in a large pot. Cook 1 pound of short pasta (penne, rigatoni, farfalle, casarecce, etc.) and cook according to the package instructions. Time the pasta so it finishes at the same time as the tomatoes and the cheese finish in the oven. Using a short pasta rather than a long one will allow the feta and tomatoes to get into the shape of the pasta in a way that is next-to-impossible when using a long pasta. Not all shapes of pasta work for all sauces.  

Reserve 1 cup of the cooking water in a heat-proof container. This water contains starches that leeched out from the pasta. Together with the proteins in the milk in the feta and the pectin in the tomatoes, this will emulsify the sauce. Drain the pasta, having reserved that cup of water. Combine the cheese and tomatoes with the pasta. Stir and create your sauce. It should emulsify on its own, but if it doesn’t, or if it does and is still too thick, take advantage of the leftover pasta water to adjust the consistency and create/maintain/reestablish an emulsified sauce.

If desired, chiffonade some basil (gather up several leaves and roll them into a bunch, then cut the bunch narrow ribbons) or simply tear it into the pasta and mix. Optionally, crack more black pepper. Serve.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Sauce Espagnole

Sauce Espagnole is not very well known per se, but one of its daughters is certainly famous: demi-glace. As Alex mentions in his series, there’s a difference between “demi-glace” and “demi-glaze.” They’re similar enough to espagnole sauce that I’ll cover all three in this entry. As I mentioned in my post on velouté, most of the stock-based sauces I make are not quite a proper velouté (light roux, light stock) or a proper espagnole (dark roux, dark stock), but a hybrid of both that I’m not sure has a name (light roux, dark stock).

Espagnole sauce has three components: tomato paste, a brown stock (traditionally veal, but it can be any protein-- and the recipe I posted for the essential chicken stock works as a method for any protein), and a brown roux. A brown root is a white root that has been cooked longer. The longer a roux cooks, the darker it becomes. If you've ever made gumbo, the color of the room that you need for sauce espagnole is about the same as you would use in a gumbo-- that is, dark, rich, mahogany brown. This can take almost half an hour. But it's better that it takes longer because you're more conservative with the heat then getting it done quickly at high heat and risking scorching something. Never walk away from a roux; as a roux darkens, the rate at which it takes on additional browning accelerates proportionally to how brown it already is. As with a light roux, if it burns get rid of it, wash out the pan, and start over.

The procedure for incorporating the liquid in Espagnole as much the same as it is in velouté and béchamel: incorporate the stock half a cup of time while continuously whisking into the dark roux (which is made of the same ingredients as in the other sauces that use light roux: equal parts flour and butter). Once all the stock is incorporated, whisk in a tube of tomato paste, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cook down for an hour. As with every other sauce thickened by a roux, be mindful of the temperature of the sauce since a roux continues to thicken a sauce even more as it cools. As with those sauces, only prepare the espagnole at the last minute.

Now, on to its first daughter: the “original” demi-glace. That version of demiglace is a 1 part veal stock reduction plus 1 part Espagnole, reduced by half (“demi” being the French for “half). However, there seems to be a more modern version of what exactly a “demi-glace” is that has become popular thanks to the internet—Alex calls this version “demi-glaze” with a “z” to differentiate it from the classic “demi-glace” with a “c”. Demi-glaze with a “z” is simply an ultra-concentrated brown stock thickened slightly with emulsified cold butter—the base of espagnole, without the roux or tomatoes—is what the French, according to Alex, simply call “glace.” This second daughter sauce is far more common than either the mother sauce or the first daughter, and, especially on the internet, will most likely be what you get if you click on a video or text recipe for something calling itself “demi-glace.” 

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

(Credit to the French Cooking Academy) 

Sauce Hollandaise

Hollandaise sauce is at the same time a classic, made ubiquitous in diners by its presence in Eggs Benedict and an enigma, its status questioned by recent revelations uncovered by Alex. More on that second point later. For now, though, let’s get right into the mother sauce that might not be one. Mother sauce or not, it’s a classic, and classics deserve to be made properly.

Let me start out by recognizing just how intimidating Hollandaise can be. In my pieces explaining the way to make the other sauces which were thickened by various colors of roux, you read “DO NOT STOP WHISKING” at least once in each of those recipes. This will be no exception. I’m serious. It’s so important, I’ll say it again now, and then yet again another time later on. When you’re making Hollandaise, DO NOT STOP WHISKING.

Hollandaise is an emulsion of egg yolk, clarified butter, and lemon juice. Emulsions, as discussed in the piece about mayonnaise, are when two substances that shouldn’t normally combine do combine because either by physical force, or by the addition of another substance, or both, they are held together. The reason I have said so many times that you CANNOT STOP WHISKING is that doing so would irreparably break the Hollandaise emulsion. A broken emulsion creates tiny pieces (the size of a grain of rice, if that big) of cooked egg yolk floating around in a pool of clarified butter. There is no way to recover from this. If this happens, throw it away, clean your pan, and start over.

First off, addressing the ingredients. Butter normally contains three things: milk protein solids, water, and fat. Clarifying the butter separates the components by density; skim off the solids and evaporate out the liquids until only fat is left. This pure butterfat is “clarified butter.” This ingredient is one of the cornerstones of sauce hollandaise.

Next, an important point about equipment. Hollandaise requires the use of a double boiler. This is not a special piece of equipment per se, but rather the combination of several common kitchen tools for a specific purpose. A double boiler simply is a bowl placed over the opening of a pan with simmering water underneath. This more gently cooks whatever is in the bowl.

 
To prepare a hollandaise, begin with the egg yolks and lemon juice in a bowl, and set that bowl over a double boiler. Whisk constantly to aerate the sauce and to pasteurize the eggs without scrambling them. DO NOT STOP WHISKING. To that last point, I cannot overstate the importance of keeping the water underneath the eggs only at a simmer; if the water boils, the eggs will coalesce, and an emulsion will be impossible. As you whisk and the eggs cook very gently in the double boiler, the extra air you introduce by whisking and the cooking process should significantly lighten the color. Lemon juice is mostly water, and clarified butter is all fat. Naturally, fat is less dense than water; the egg yolks’ protein matrices will hold these components together.

As the eggs begin to lighten and take on more volume, slowly stream in clarified butter. DO NOT STOP WHISKING. Once all the clarified butter has been incorporated and the emulsion complete, take the sauce off the double boiler, season with salt and cayenne, and serve immediately.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Sauce Tomate

As I said in the intro, my family’s palate has been distinctly Italian even in the century since we left Italy. So, there’s one French mother sauce we consume and prepare more often than all the others combined—the one some French chefs (Alex included) will actually defer to Italians as the ultimate authority: the tomato sauce. I know I started the series singing the praises of Chefs Escoffier and Carême as titanic visionaries who changed cooking forever, and by saying that the formulation of mother and daughter sauces is an enormous part of that legacy, but dare I say, Alex is right and Chefs Escoffier and Carême are wrong here (especially in the notion that a roux belongs anywhere near a tomato sauce; tomatoes have more than enough pectin-- a natural thickener-- in their cells to no longer need help from anything else but time, and a roux would completely change the consistency). That is, the French “sauce tomate” is not the best form of a tomato sauce and as someone of considerable Italian blood, I’d much rather teach the Italian method than the French one.

I’ll leave no stone unturned, no question unanswered. Nothing will be “too obvious to answer”—a mistake that experienced chefs on the internet sometimes make. Let’s start with what is certainly the most obvious element of a tomato sauce: the tomatoes. I always use some subset of these 4 tomato products in my tomato sauces, prepared in the Italian tradition: Roma tomatoes, on-the-vine tomatoes, cherry or grape tomatoes, and San Marzano tomatoes. Roma and vine tomatoes are best in the summer. Cherry or grape tomatoes, which are much smaller, stay good longer. San Marzano tomatoes, grown in peak season then preserved and packed, are also always an excellent option, though, since they must be grown in a protected area of Italy (in the same way the French are particular about what you can call “real champagne”), they are certainly the most expensive option.

I remember that when we stayed at his place in the summer (winter, technically, in the southern hemisphere) in 2007, one of my granduncles, the most recent link our family has to Italy, spent hours marking a little x at each tomato’s top and bottom poles, dropping the tomato in boiling water, letting the skin loosen, pulling it off, and then shocking it in ice water—before cooking it in the sauce in earnest for several hours. If you want to be as thorough as he was when he made that sauce, you absolutely can follow his lead. But if you don’t have the time or energy to undergo such a labor-intensive process, you can absolutely produce a stunning sauce omitting this step.

How many tomatoes you use depends on a variety of factors largely reducible to only one: personal taste. In general, I like 5 tomatoes per pound of pasta. This can vary depending on whether I have more fleshy vegetables (bell peppers), the juiciness of the tomatoes, or precisely what sauce I’m making. I very rarely deliberately use only tomatoes in my sauces; even by adding bell peppers (usually 5:2 or 6:2, tomatoes: bell peppers), the sauce remains very tomato-forward.

Among Italians, the texture of a proper tomato-based sauce is always one of the hottest culinary debates. If I’m making a sauce destined to be served with pasta, then I keep it fairly chunky, using a food processor. But if I’m making a tomato sauce that will be combined with cream (as in the recipe I posted for Stroganoff), then I make the sauce as creamy as possible by using a blender instead.

We rarely have carrots or celery at home, so I can rarely ever make a complete “sofrito,” but I would strongly recommend very finely mincing—almost to a paste—carrots, onions, celery (the classic French mirepoix) and garlic. I normally only have regular access to onions and garlic, but whatever you have, dice it, and sweat it out (cook off the internal moisture without much color) before adding tomatoes and peppers that have been blended to your desired consistency. When the blended tomatoes hit the pan, season everything with dried oregano, dried basil, and freshly ground black pepper, but wait until the sauce has reached its final volume before seasoning it with salt.

Keep an eye on your tomato sauce to prevent it from burning and add water as necessary. Cook, uncovered at a low simmer for at least 45 minutes and up to 3 hours.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Sauce Béchamel

As a young kid, I think béchamel sauce was my first exposure to anything “French” in the kitchen. Looking back, Bechamel is probably the best mother sauce to be the first mother sauce a new chef learns because compared to the other sauces, it requires significantly less mise en place, that is, preparatory work before you start cooking to make sure “everything is in its place.” If you’ve already read my article on velouté, then you have a pretty good primer. If this is you, all you need to know is that you should follow the velouté instructions, except your liquid will be milk instead of white stock. If you haven’t read my previous article, stick around and I’ll explain béchamel.

Béchamel is one of the five fundamental sauces of French cooking, one of its Mother Sauces. One of its “daughters,” Mornay (bechamel plus shredded cheese which is melted into it) is the sauce base for American mac and cheese.
Bechamel begins, as does velouté, with what’s called a white roux. A “roux” in French cuisine is a flour-butter paste made of equal proportions of those ingredients which are cooked over low heat to some degree of color which serves as a thickener. If you’ve ever made gumbo, you’ve made a roux which, chances are, was quite dark. There will come a time in this series of articles where we need a dark roux, but béchamel is not that use-case. The proper roux used in a béchamel is cooked down just until the ingredients don’t smell “floury” anymore, but instead take on a rather nutty character (imagine the smell of freshly toasted nuts—that’s what we’re going for, without burning anything). It is especially important that the roux that has been made for a bechamel not be allowed to burn. If there’s even a hint of burned smell coming from your roux, throw it away, clean your pan out, and get more flour and butter to start again.

 
Once the roux is nutty, add milk half a cup at a time until you have enough sauce in your saucepan.  Simmer about 20 minutes on very low heat. Whisk constantly to prevent anything from burning on the sides or bottom of the saucepan, and to discourage the formation of lumps in the sauce. Sauces thickened by roux get more viscous as they cool; as with the velouté, make bechamel only in a time of immediate need to prevent degradation of texture or flavor caused by this thermal thickening. Season a bechamel with salt, freshly ground pepper, and fresh-grated nutmeg.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Photo Credit to Epicurious

Sauce Velouté

Let me start out by making a quick acknowledgment: Technically, I haven’t made a velouté before, so I apologize if I come off sounding snobbish in giving instructions for a procedure I haven’t done myself. Velouté and its derivative daughter sauces are made with white stock and white roux, and, typically, whenever I make stock-roux sauces, I make a white roux and a brown stock. Not quite espagnole (brown roux, brown stock), not quite velouté (white roux, white stock).

Now, with that out of the way: Velouté starts with white stock. In my previous post about chicken stock, I laid out a protocol for making brown stock (turning meat and aromatic vegetables into umami booster bombs by roasting them in high, dry heat in an oven before submerging them in water and simmering them to create stock). That procedure, as I mentioned in the original post, creates a brown stock. “Brown stocks” look darker and have undergone the Maillard Browning Reaction, hence their name. “White stocks,” on the other hand, are designed to be much milder than brown stocks. (But brown stocks are more versatile, so given the choice between making several quarts of brown or white, I’ll nearly always opt for brown, unless I know I’ll need the stock for velouté, and recommend you do the same.) A white stock, on the other hand, is lighter in color, milder in flavor, and typically not simmered for as long as a brown one.

Crucially, the bones in a white stock are not roasted but blanched. That is, place the bones in your stockpot (alone—no aromatics yet) and cover them with water. Bring the bones up to a rapid boil as quickly as possible and hold them there for 3 minutes. Discard the water and rinse the bones off in cold water. Then, return them to the stockpot with clean water and what’s known as a “white mirepoix” (leeks, mushrooms, peeled onions) as opposed to the “traditional mirepoix” (carrots, onions with the skins on, celery), and simmer for 2 hours as opposed to up to 24 for the brown.

 
Make the white roux in the same way as for the béchamel (equal parts flour and butter cooked out so they don’t smell floury anymore, but nutty instead, without developing color), but, unlike the béchamel, whisk in this white stock instead of milk. Like the bechamel, whisk the liquid into the roux half a cup at a time to prevent lumping, and keep the sauce on low heat until it reaches nappe, the stage where the sauce is thick enough to leave a trail on the back of a spoon, without burning. Simmer about 20 minutes on very low heat. Finally, like the bechamel, remember that velouté, because it is thickened by a roux and not simply by reduction, will continue to thicken as it cools, so prepare the velouté sauce only when it is absolutely necessary.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

(Credit to The Kitchen)

Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is certainly the forgotten one of the five (six?) mother sauces of classic French cooking—all of which are sauces that every cook should know how to prepare well. It’s almost certainly the most common mother sauce. How many times have you seen mayonnaise at the grocery store or at a restaurant? Not even béchamel, the second most common sauce, is seen, bought, or consumed on the scale of mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise in a sense defies the laws of physics that govern the universe. Better stated, it finds a loophole in those laws and then exploits it. Oil and water are not supposed to come together, and yet, in mayo, they do. This happens by way of an emulsion, held together by two things: physical force and an emulsifying chemical agent, which in this case is some kind of mustard. Water and oil are polar molecules, meaning they have positively-charged ends and negatively-charged ends. Left alone, because of their polarities and their different densities (oil floats on water), oil and water will naturally separate, no matter how much whisking or another action that uses physical force to combine the substances is applied to them. Mustard and egg yolks contain molecules that are oleophilic and others that are hydrophilic. Because of this, they can turn the oil into a bunch of microdroplets that cannot coalesce into bigger droplets, holding the oil and water together. Successfully creating this emulsion creates high-quality mayo; failure results in an oil slick on top of all the other ingredients mixed together.

Every part of the procedure for making mayonnaise is designed to make this emulsion as likely as possible to succeed. To this end, I recommend mixing all the other ingredients (vinegar, mustard, egg yolk, and any flavorings, like minced garlic) together, and, only once they’re combined, very slowly incorporating the oil. In his video, it seems like Alex put a whisk attachment on a drill to combine the other ingredients, and then to keep the mixture moving while streaming in the oil. Unorthodox as that approach might be, it certainly works. The average home-cook might not have access to a drill, so three more common tools are just as effective as alternatives: a whisk, a hand-mixer, and a stand-mixer.

Using the hand whisk is certainly the most traditional method, but it’s the most error-prone. Be very careful using a whisk, taking care to always be whisking quickly, vigorously, and continuously. Add il literally a drop at a time in the beginning. As the mixture takes on more oil, you can increase the rate at which you add oil. This is one of the great paradoxes of mayonnaise, and emulsions in general. Vinegar, eggs, mustard, etc., are clearly liquid. Oil is clearly liquid as well. And yet, adding liquid oil into the first liquid mixture turns the resulting emulsion ever more solid as more oil is added.

The hand-mixer is better than the human-powered-whisk method since the whisk attachments are powered by an electrical current and rotate faster than a human could ever rotate a whisk. This creates much smaller oil bubbles in the mixture. The mixture grabs onto smaller oil bubbles more easily than bigger bubbles, and smaller bubbles are easier to trap in a matrix. The easier it is to trap oil bubbles in this matrix, the higher the success rate of the emulsion of the ingredients into mayonnaise.

The stand-mixer approach is in principle the same as the hand-mixer approach, only bigger and better. Stand mixers are generally bigger machines with more powerful motors and bigger whisk attachments. The bigger a whisk attachment, the more air it incorporates into whatever is being whisked. In this particular case, this means the stand-mixer creates even smaller droplets of oil in the vinegar-egg mixture.
But the two electric-powered mixer methods have one potential downfall. An inexperienced chef will assume, just because the electric mixing approach is so much faster and better than any human could be, that the oil can be added all at once and that the delay in adding the oil in the beginning in the first method is only because humans can’t whip as quickly as machines. This is false. Even with the most powerful machine, you still need to add the oil slowly in the beginning.

Whatever method you use to prepare this iconic cold sauce, never lose sight of its foundational importance in French cuisine or of the techniques of building emulsions central to this sauce’s execution. If you do these things, every mayonnaise you prepare from now on will be worthy of the dignity of a mother sauce.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Mother Sauces: An Introduction to a Blog Series Inspired by Alex Aïnouz

Alex Aïnouz (of YouTube fame as “French Guy Cooking) made a wonderful series on YouTube, and what this next series of blog posts will do is go through his series of videos and offer my take on each one of the sauces he presents. But first, some background. I took on the responsibility for almost a year and a half of cooking daily for my parents and me, and Alex has been really helpful by helping me hone the skills I already had and by allowing me to learn new things and explore areas of the kitchen I had never known before the pandemic.

Before the pandemic hit, I had never even so much as heard “mother sauce” or “daughter sauce.” Certainly, I had heard “my mother’s sauce” which is not what is meant by the terms. In this case, however, “mother/daughter” refers to a kind of hierarchy. The French define the five most fundamental—or is it six? We’ll answer that later—sauces as the “mother sauces.” These five sauces are the cornerstones of French cuisine as defined by Escoffier and Carême, two French chefs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were both, in their time, called “the chef of the kings and the king of the chefs.” Escoffier and Carême were so good at their craft, so instrumental in making cooking what it is today that, in all likelihood, there have never been any chefs who have even come close to their influence.

I learned all this from Alex and his 12-part “Mother Sauces” series viewable on YouTube. This series of blog posts will be shorter—only 8 posts—including this one, one for each of the five “traditional” mother sauces, one for the mother sauce unfairly left out, and one explaining why one of the traditional five is actually an impostor. This last one will be a summary of Alex’s research; I cannot take credit for the research, as here I am merely a reporter. I finally feel confident enough in my knowledge of these sauces that, over several months, I have written these articles and they’re finally all ready to be shared with the world.

I have been in the kitchen since I was a toddler: at first, I just watched. I remember having a little purple and green stool that we kept in the kitchen from which I could pay attention. At first, that was my space to just watch, but as I grew a little older, that was my little spot from where I could help my mom cook. I got older, and I started copying my mom’s recipes, or, more often, playing the part of the “sous-chef” to her “chef-de-cuisine.” COVID brought about a change in our home kitchen. I went from a “line cook” or “sous” to the chef in the family. I had more work in the kitchen, but that also meant more time to hone my techniques, develop my own recipes, and turn food into one of the many ways to express love for my family.

Here’s where Alex comes in. I watched his series, and I realized I had never made 3 of the 5—or, really, 4 of the 6—mother sauces at the beginning of my time leading my family’s kitchen, and even fewer of the daughters (since each mother has several daughters). My mom’s family, going back a few generations, were in Italy. Even a hundred-plus years removed from living in Italy, our family’s palette is still very Italian. Classic Italian cuisine uses tomatoes everywhere. There we go: one mother sauce. We don’t have it as often as we used to, but we do sometimes have dishes cooked with béchamel. Watching Alex made me realize those were the only two sauces I had ever worked with. So, I made it my mission to work with all of them.

This next series of posts will first go through each of the five (six) sauces and explain how to make each of them. Every chef should know all of these sauces. They are, after all, the foundation of classical cooking. The last post in this series will address what Alex called his “thesis-level revelation” and, at least in the small corner of the internet in which I have a presence, correct the record, and hopefully make some progress at rectifying a century-old mistake.

This series will cover, in this order, my recipes for béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomate, hollandaise, mayonnaise, and, finally, I’ll explain Alex’s “thesis-level” revelation regarding the last two.

In the series, Alex goes to visit Chef-de-Cuisine Christian LeSquer (***) at the Hotel George V in Paris and at the Chef’s home, learning how to build great sauces from Chef LeSquer and from Executive Chef Romain Mauduit. Chef Le Squer tasks his Executive Chef with teaching Alex how to build sauces, and, at one point, the three of them gather at Chef Le Squer’s house, and the two professionals—the ultimate authority and someone who works immediately under him at a 3-star restaurant in Paris—give a sauce Alex prepares following their advice a very solid 2-stars. 

Chef Le Squer and Chef Mauduit remind Alex that, at their core, every good chef must be a good saucier first. Sauce-making is a lost art in the Western home kitchen, and I want to bring it back, one blog post at a time.

How a translation mistake changed the world's perception of a cornerstone of French cuisine

I mentioned in the introductory post that the last one in this series about the mother sauces would be a summary of what Alex calls his “thesis-level revelation” about the five (or six?) sauces, describing his sources and his conclusions.

At the beginning of the series, Alex does extensive research, quite a bit of which is at the BnF (the French equivalent of the US Library of Congress). There, he finds information that, in his mind, at least might imply (if not definitively prove) a contradiction between his materials and (not hyperbole) almost every other source available on the internet regarding the identity of the last of the five mother sauces. So, Alex emails a contact who is an expert in the history of the French cuisine. Directed by this friend to the “Larousse Gastronomique” by Prosper Montagné, a contemporary of Escoffier’s, Alex must go to the restricted section of the National Library to find a book from 1936. The “Larousse” confirms that mayonnaise, rather than Hollandaise, is the fifth mother sauce. Yes mayonnaise—the same condiment you probably have in your fridge right now—is the fifth mother sauce, and not Hollandaise, until now an undisputed classic mother sauce.

Going down one rabbit hole never ends with the exploration of just that single tunnel. Rabbit holes are rabbit holes precisely because of this: one revelation can trigger more research that leads to another breakthrough that leads to more research, and so on. And so it was for Alex, who, just as he left the Library, was reminded to check for translations in the (public) section of the Library and elsewhere on the internet. The nature of his research then changes, as Alex goes looking for English-language sources since it seems to be that nearly every English-language cooking blog or online cookbook calls Hollandaise, not Mayonnaise, the 5th sauce.

Auguste Escoffier wrote Le Guide Culinaire in 1903—and almost 110 years later, it’s still in print and remains one of the most influential cookbooks, the highest authority possible on French cuisine that both is and supports the legacy of perhaps the greatest chef ever. Four years later, as Alex finds, the English-language translation, done by a “W. Heineman” and published in London. This translation in 1907 misplaces both mayonnaise and hollandaise, putting hollandaise in the “mother sauces” section and classifying mayonnaise as a daughter. That cookbook sold well, and enough people saw it that it started being accepted. Those people taught the next generation of chefs who taught the next generation who taught the next generation who taught the next generation, and now everyone thinks hollandaise is a mother sauce because that’s how things go viral and propagate from generation to generation.

Armed with official confirmation (from the original) that the translation was incorrect, Alex set out to correct the record, creating a brand new “French Mother Sauces” Wikipedia page. However, in the year-plus since he created the page, it has been edited dozens, if not hundreds of times, some of which reverted back to the incorrect information simply because there were more sources saying the wrong thing.

I’m not here to take credit for Alex’s wonderful research or for the Wikipedia article he wrote (and had the great idea of preserving his original work on his website, which you can read here); I am simply documenting this to do what he did: try to reach as big an audience as possible to correct the record as amended by the translation from a century ago and perpetuated by almost every other online source out there, all deriving their notions of which sauces are mother sauces from that faulty translation. What you put on your sandwich is a mother sauce. What you put over your poached eggs is not.

Fried Rice, without a wok

I’ve been waffling for months between posting this or not, but if you’re reading this, it made it onto the blog. I've been insecure about whether I should post this because I am by no means an expert in Asian cuisine, but there is one highly customizable class of dishes that I do feel quite comfortable with and that every home cook should be comfortable with as well: fried rice. Further, this class of dishes employs a critical technique I truly think every cook should know and use, and this gives me a chance to explain that technique and how and why to use it. 

Fried rice can be intimidating, not least because of the equipment normally required. To be absolutely correct, I would be recommending a wok at this point. If you have one and you know how to season it and how to use it, by all means, do that! But if you, like me, don’t have a wok, a 6-quart pan is an acceptable alternative. For the most part, learning fried rice is much more about learning a process and then applying that process repeatedly by trial and error than it is about learning hard-and-fast rules (but if that kind of cooking, stick around for my upcoming series of posts on the Mother Sauces; I’ll link to them here when they go live).

The star of anything called “fried rice” is, rather obviously, rice. I’ve developed this recipe using brown rice because that’s all we have at home. Brown rice works, but it isn’t the gold standard; for that, you need jasmine rice. Whatever rice you choose to use, fried rice cannot be made quickly. The rice must be cooked until it is done and then allowed to cool completely, ideally up to 24 hours in advance.

This particular fried rice is the one I riff on whenever I’m home and we decide we want fried rice. If you have different tastes or if you happen to have different ingredients in your fridge, feel free to adapt this recipe. I use boneless, skinless chicken thighs as my protein of choice, though I have seen recipes that call for steak, shrimp, tofu, or that don’t include any protein or protein substitutes. If you use chicken like I do, opt for dark meat over white meat; it more readily takes on the marinade we will prepare, and it holds up better to the intense heat of the stir-frying process. Breast can get so overcooked that it almost takes on a chalky texture. If all you have is white meat, use it, but be careful to cook it to 165 Fahrenheit (the safe temperature for chicken), but no higher. Whatever protein you use, make sure it is cut into slightly larger than bite-size pieces. Protein shrinks when it cooks, so make sure to account for that. Cutting the protein to this size also maximizes the surface that the marinade can coat and through which it can penetrate deeper into the interior of the protein.

I make a marinade out of soy sauce, oyster sauce, microplaned garlic and ginger, finely chopped scallions, freshly cracked black pepper, and a corn starch-water slurry (corn starch and water in equal proportions by volume). Oyster sauce and soy sauce are both salty, so there is no need for extra salt. If you don’t have a Microplane, place all the ingredients except the slurry in a food processor, and blitz for 20 seconds to combine. Then, when everything except the slurry has been added, whisk in the slurry. If you want to adjust the quantities of ingredients to better suit your tastes or dietary needs, feel free to do so. Notice I am being very vague about amounts in this recipe, only giving proportions, and then, only when absolutely necessary. Being any more specific than I am being right now would take away from the personalization of this dish, and that’s the last thing I want to do. Whatever protein you choose, and however you choose to make your marinade, leave the protein in the marinade for 24 hours.

As I said in the beginning, I am not an expert in Asian cooking per se. But I am an expert in one of the techniques that anyone must learn if they wish to execute this dish well: that which the French call “mise en place.” I’ve talked about this method, which in French literally means “setting everything in its place” in many of my recipes. Whenever I cook, I always hold myself to this standard, and if I cook in a group, I hold everyone to this standard. It makes the kitchen cleaner, and a cleaner kitchen is always easier to work in and will always produce better food more consistently than a dirty kitchen.

Wash, peel, cut, and do anything else you need to do to your ingredients ahead of time. In many dishes, this will significantly relieve time pressure without necessarily being of such high importance as to make or break a dish. But in fried rice (as in any stir-fry), mise en place (or not) will make or break your dish. Suppose it takes an inexperienced cook 40 seconds to peel and chop a vegetable. But the cook needs that vegetable 20 seconds in the future. The cook cannot possibly get the vegetable to the right place at the right time—a further 20 seconds are still required to peel it or chop it— and because of that, whatever is in the pan has 20 extra seconds during which to become overcooked, or, worse, to burn. This could be any ingredient at any point in the stir-frying process. And if this ever happens, a batch of fried rice should immediately be discarded. To maximize good yield, always do the “busy work” early so that that hypothetical vegetable needed 20 seconds from now is actually ready and accessible in 20 seconds. Do this process early on the day you plan to prepare the dish—so that you can immediately start cooking once you are done—but never so early that you would return an ingredient to the refrigerator after it has been prepared. Of course, this process is applicable and indeed necessary in far more applications than stir-fries, but because these dishes are always so moving so quickly once they get started, they’re my favorite time to mention this technique. Adopt it regularly and you will notice a difference in the workflow in your kitchen, whether you are a seasoned professional or a beginner home-cook.

On the day on which the fried rice is to be prepared, crack as many eggs into a bowl as there are portions of food (3 eggs for 3 portions; 12 eggs for 12 portions; etc.), and whisk until homogenous. There should be no streaks of white, and the beaten egg should fall off the whisk rather easily. Add a very small amount of neutral oil to a pan and follow with the eggs; get them moving as soon as possible. Cook them quickly over high heat without burning and reserve them.

Add more oil, and, stirring constantly, introduce your vegetables. I typically like to use carrots, bell peppers (any combination of colors), onions, ginger, and garlic. (Yes, I double-up on the ginger and garlic; recall that I asked for microplaned ginger and garlic earlier in the recipe while making the marinade and sauce for the protein; this is not a mistake. ) Bring them into the pan in descending order of cooking times; that is, things that take longer to cook go in earlier. Especially if you have a wok and/or an especially high-powered burner, it might only take a matter of a few seconds for the eggs to cook in the previous step or for it to be time to introduce the next vegetable in this step. Reserve this once cooked.

Now, add more oil and cook the chicken and the sauce in which it marinated until the chicken is cooked through. Chicken is safe at 160 Fahrenheit, but I like to take dark meat (like the thighs I recommended) to at least 180. Once the chicken is cooked through and you are sure none of the sauce has burned, reintroduce the vegetables, but hold the eggs. Once the vegetables have had a few seconds in the sauce, introduce the rice cooked 24 hours ago. Stir thoroughly but gently to coat the individual grains of rice in the sauce, but not very vigorously; your goal is to coat the rice in the sauce, not to release the rice’s natural starches like you would when making a risotto. Immediately before serving, reintroduce the eggs.

Garnish with scallions cut as thinly as possible on as strong a bias as possible. (Cutting something when the knife is perfectly perpendicular to whatever is being cut introduces no “bias.” To achieve this—purely for presentation—angle your knife as much as you are comfortable with to one side or the other, and cut as you would, in this case, at that high angle as thinly as possible.)

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!