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)