Creamed Spinach

Creamed spinach is yet another essential in the (especially Southern) American Thanksgiving menu. This recipe is actually two in one, so, rather than repeating the whole text of the second recipe here, I’ll simply provide a link to it when the time comes, and I’ll follow that with any modifications this recipe needs over that one.

Spinach—and most leafy greens— cooks down to an incredibly small volume relative to how much was in your pan to begin with. You need about 3-4 ounces of dry spinach (60-80% of the volume of a typical 5 oz package. For those in the metric system, that’s about 60-80% of a 140-gram package) per person. Most of this mass is water trapped inside the cells of the spinach, and when you sauté the spinach, most of that liquid will be boiled off, thereby losing all that volume, but, at the same time, concentrating the flavor of the spinach.

Before you start sauteing the spinach, mince or press 3 cloves of garlic and slice one onion into half-moons (cut the onion through the stem and the root; cut off the stem; make thin slices parallel to the root until you reach it; repeat this for the other half of the onion; your slices should look like a bunch of copies of the letter “C” made out of onion). Sweat out the onions over medium heat, then add the garlic. Make sure the onions go in first so that the garlic doesn’t burn. “Sweating” for onions means “cooking just to drive off moisture until the onions turn translucent, but no further.” If you go any further than this, you’ll start getting jammy, golden-brown, sweeter onions. These are very good in certain contexts (that’s exactly what you want for French onion soup, which I’ll probably write a recipe for in the winter at some point, and if I do, those words will become a hyperlink to that recipe), but not here. Here, caramelizing onions messes with the texture, color, and flavors we want in this side dish, so if they get caramelized, unfortunately, throw the onions away or use them for something else—they aren’t useful here.

At this point, start making a mornay sauce. Make a béchamel by following this recipe from my Mother Sauces series from early October. Turn it into a mornay by melting in a freshly grated well-melting cheese, like a white cheddar, gruyère, or gouda. Grate in as much cheese as you would like, and whisk to melt and properly emulsify. Industrially pre-shredded or pre-grated cheeses won’t work for this. They have too many emulsifiers and stabilizers that chemically alter the taste and texture too much when melted to work well in a mornay.

Once the onions and garlic have sweated out and become fragrant, add a touch more olive oil to your pan and place in the spinach (4-5 people need a pound of raw spinach. Scale that up or down according to your family’s needs.).Cook out the spinach until it wilts and most of the moisture in it evaporates away. Let it cool in the pan in which it was cooked. Once it is at room temperature, remove as much more moisture as possible by running it through a salad spinner. Once you have removed as much moisture as possible, return your spinach to the same pan (which you have now dried) and ladle in as much mornay as you would like.

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 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 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.

Chef-Essential Homemade Chicken Stock

Chicken stock is, perhaps, the most universal of the classic stocks, and so it is the most versatile in its applications. Stocks, in general, can be deceptively simple: take a bunch of bones, roast them (or omit this step for a different kind of chicken stock), throw a bunch of chopped vegetables into a stockpot, submerge all of that in water, and let it simmer for several hours. Easy, right? Actually, stocks can be quite complex—much more complex than that deliberately dramatic way I just presented them. It is often said that you can rank a lineup of chefs in order from best to worst based purely on a blind test of a sampling of their stocks. For that reason, and because stocks are such basic building blocks of so many dishes in the kitchen, it is vital that every home cook know the best techniques.

The largest pot we have here at home, by capacity, is an 8-quart Dutch Oven, which I have featured in a few recipes before. That is not nearly large enough, nor is it the right shape for making stock. I have regularly used my Dutch oven to make ragù Bolognese, especially if and when the grocery store substituted our order for more meat than we ordered during the quarantine. That Dutch oven made enough ragù for 8 meals if the pasta was particularly saucy, and for 12 meals if the sauce was rationed. Followed exactly, this recipe would double the capacity if the Dutch oven. Capacity aside, there is another problem with my Dutch oven: it is quite short, and it is rather wide. This geometry creates a problem. Wider surface areas lend to quicker evaporation, and, again, this is a basic stock, not a demiglace reduction, so we want to minimize evaporation. Some evaporation is bound to happen, and water can and should be added to counteract that throughout the simmering process. The ideal pot has a very large volume but is very tall and very narrow, especially in proportion to its height.  

The pot that is needed for these stocks as the recipe is written is at least twice as voluminous as the biggest one I have (so I can only ever make half a batch at a time at home). The requisite stock-making vessel is whatever the largest available stockpot which is suitable for your kitchen and which you can easily find is; they’re widely available at hardware or big-box stores (i.e., Ace, Walmart, Target, Costco, etc.), and they usually run about $20 to $40. The absolute minimum size for this recipe (if not proportionally reduced) is 18 quarts—4.5 gallons (almost exactly 17L). Bigger is better, but for a non-industrial kitchen, the biggest I recommend is 32 quarts—8 gallons (30.3L). Be sure you have found a good stockpot in the recommended volume range before proceeding, especially if you have decided to use a smaller pot for smaller batches.

This recipe can be adjusted, so if you are making much more or much less stock—I only made 6 quarts at a time—use a larger or smaller but correctly proportional pan (i.e., one that is taller than it is wide and has more than enough volume for the amount of stock you want to make) and it will work just as well. Whatever style or capacity is used, even if it has a lid, do not use it.

The first question about actual food we need to address, naturally, is what cut of chicken to use in chicken stock. My recommendation is to use wings. At least here in the US, it is relatively easy to find wings in trays that weigh 4 to 7 pounds (1.8 to 3.2 kg), and they are typically sold either cut up into two parts when only the meatier drumette is sold, or they’re sold whole. For this stock, the best option would be to buy 2 of those trays of whole wings. Whole wings contain lots of collagen, which will be most beneficial in the preparation of the best stock. If you have leftover carcasses (as we did a few days before this was written, since we'd just bought a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store a few days before), they work just as well.

The French call the combination of onions, celery, and carrots (to which I recommend the technically non-traditional addition of garlic) “mirepoix.”  Other recipes for more exacting dishes might call for precise cuts in the mirepoix, but I’ll only recommend that the onions, carrots, and celery be about the same size within each vegetable, and that they are cut in the following way: 2 pounds of onions (4-6 onions), roughly cut into quarters; 1 stalk of celery (that includes multiple ribs connected at one point), cut into thirds after the root has been cut off; and 1 pound of carrots, peeled, and with the very top and very bottom of each carrot cut off. This 2:1:1 ratio is standard in any restaurant kitchen that prepares anything requiring mirepoix, and, even if you do not cook professionally, is a great flavor base to add to almost any savory Western dish. You can either not peel the onions and just quarter them, or peel them, quarter them, and put the skins back in the stock. (Italians call this combination of vegetables "soffrito" and Spaniards call it "refogado.") Further, slice 2 heads of garlic across their equators. This opens up all of the cloves at once and allows them to release their flavorful oils into the stock. Roasted garlic becomes very umami-sweet and much less bitter and pungent than fresh raw garlic. You can add other hearty vegetables like leeks and parsnips, to your stock, if you like them and/or they are in season. Don't worry about being too pretty with any of the cuts here-- all the solids will be eventually strained out.  

I have mentioned another French term, “mise en place,” before, and a number of my previous recipes, like this one, are just fancy exercises in mise en place. Each stock will require a substantial amount of mise en place. The tasks will not be particularly complex, but they will be time-consuming and repetitive, namely, in chopping the vegetables and organizing the vegetables and the wings on roasting trays.

Some stocks are brown, and others are white. Brown stocks are stocks for which the protein is roasted. In general, for these applications, 400 Fahrenheit for an hour and a half should work quite well. A chicken stock that uses wings needs about an hour to develop the deep flavor and caramelization typical of brown stock, and for evenness in this effect, I recommend flipping the wings every 20 minutes.

White stocks, on the other hand, are stocks where the protein is first blanched and shocked in cold water before being introduced to the stockpot. To blanch, cover the protein in cold water in a pan large enough to contain it, and, as quickly as possible, bring that liquid to a boil. Once the water boils, keep the protein there no less than 10, but no more than 30 seconds. Immediately kill the heat, drain the water, and move the protein to an ice bath. The ice stops the cooking process as quickly as possible. This will remove any mineral impurities from the surface of the bones. This is the defining difference between brown stock and white stock. Brown is roasted, white is blanched. Whatever protein is used, brown will be significantly richer, the flavor of the meat that was used will be more pronounced, and the color will be much lighter in the white stock as compared to the brown. Knowing now the difference between brown and white, the rest of this recipe will proceed along the brown path. 

Chicken is the easiest to burn among the proteins typically used to make stock, so adjust these times according to the power of your oven and err on the side of slightly under-roasting. Arrange the chicken wings, celery, garlic, onions, carrots, and other vegetables on roasting pans and place them in a preheated (400 F) oven. Every 15 minutes rotate the roasting trays a half-turn. Once 45 minutes have passed, squeeze 1 tube of tomato paste onto the chicken and vegetables, and toss to coat. Even coating prevents burning and promotes equal browning at the same rate. As before, every 15 minutes rotate the trays a half-turn, but now, in addition, also flip the contents of those trays. This will ensure deep, even caramelization and will prevent burning. If anything burns, throw everything away and start over. (You can skip the rotation if you drop the temperature to 350 and activate convection mode on your oven if it exists.)

After the 75-minute roast, the chicken will have released some fat, and both it and the vegetables will have released some water. Some of what was released will still be liquid, while some of what was released will have gotten stuck to the tray, solidified, and caramelized. Transfer all the solids and what you can of the liquids into the stockpot. Then, using some water and a spatula, scrape the surface of the pans to dissolve what is stuck to them into the water. How much flavor is contained in these solid bits, and what proportional yield of these solid bits a chef can get from their pans, more than anything else, will be the key to differentiating “okay” stock from “great” stock.  This process is known as “deglazing,” and doing this (as opposed to writing off those solids) maximizes flavor. The chicken stock itself is a popular deglazing liquid in making sauces, stews, soups, gravies, and the like, but for now, since we are just now building the stock, use water, or if you are feeling adventurous and want to add fruity notes to your stock, some white wine.

Take all the liquid you have deglazed into the stockpot, together with the easily accessible liquid you poured out and the solids from the roasting pan. Start filling the 18-quart stockpot with 12 quarts (3 gallons, 11.3 liters) of water. (This can, of course, be adjusted proportionally if you need more or less stock, so long as the amounts of chicken and vegetables are adjusted as well.) Flavor the stock with a bay leaf, fresh dill, parsley, oregano, and thyme bound in a bouquet garni with butcher's twine for easy removal in a few hours. After all the water and solids are in the stockpot, make sure you have at least 2 inches of clearance from the lip. 

Turn on the burner to its lowest setting possible while still maintaining a flame. Especially in the beginning, monitor the stock and skim it as foam rises to the top. While the foam is not dangerous per se, it makes the stock look cloudy at the end, so you are doing this purely for aesthetics. If the water line ever crosses below the solids in the pot, add more water until the solids are submerged by an inch and a half of water, but maintain proper clearance so the liquid never boils over.  

If you are in a hurry, leave the stock on the stove for no less than 2 hours before cooling, portioning, and storing (in the fridge for up to a week, in the freezer for up to 6 months). Ideally, though, a chicken stock should be left on the stove for 4 to 24 hours on as low heat as possible. Skim early and often; the later you wait to skim, the more flavor you will remove in addition to the scum.

At the end of the cooking time, discard the solids in the stock, strain it, and transfer it into a container large enough to hold all of it which has been placed in a plugged-up sink filled with ice water. Strain the stock carefully: the more clear the stock, generally, the better the quality. The ice water surrounding the stock’s new container will cool it quickly and safely.

Place some (clean) ice into the stock in its cooling container. Leave the ice-stock out to cool until it is cold enough to go into the refrigerator. The ice in the stock will melt into the stock, diluting it slightly, but, more importantly, will cause all the fat in the stock to rise to the top of that container in a giant disk of fat when left in the fridge for a long time, and it will chill it safely. Discard the fat. Collagen in the bones will have leached out and dissolved into the water; when heat is applied, collagen chemically changes into gelatin. If your stock looks like “meaty Jell-O” at this point in the process, until now, you have done everything well. Portion out your stock however you need to (in gallon/half-gallon/quart/pint/cup containers), and freeze what you do not need in resealable, airtight containers. Put what you will use immediately in the fridge, and use it within 3 days. Kept in a freezer in an airtight container, this stock will keep for up to 6 months.

Whenever you need your homemade stock, pull out a container and thaw and reheat its contents, most ideally in an appropriately sized saucepan. Once reheated, the gelatin in the stock will dissolve and the familiar liquid consistency will return. Only when you need the stock, add salt to the quantity of stock you are using immediately.

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