Posts Tagged ‘sauce’

In the Worfolk household, we have themed months. I work through cookbooks fairly sequentially, and it takes me about a month to get through one, so each month ends to have a theme. For the past two months, that theme has been sauces.

I have been working with Michel Roux’s Sauces. I think it might be my new favourite cookbook. It has so many great recipes in there. It feels different to a regular cookbook and in some ways it makes things easier: if you have a great sauce you can literally just fry some chicken and serve it as is with the sauce.

The book is not without criticism. The recipes use so much veal stock. I don’t think I have ever seen veal for sale in UK supermarkets. Other ingredients are unavailable too. So far though, they have all been easy to substitute.

Bread sauce, mustard and white wine sauce.

Parsley nage with lemon grass.

Bearnaise sauce.

Juniper sauce.

Curried mussels.

Sea bass and shrimp sauce.

I made a red pepper sabayon a few weeks ago.

You will have to take my word for it that I was using sweet pointed red peppers. I had already taken them off the BBQ by the time I took this photo. You blister the skin then plunge them into icy water so that you can peel them.

The finished sauce.

One of the things I was particularly impressed with about the food in Iceland was that everywhere did a good hollandaise sauce. It seemed to be the standard sauce that everywhere from fancy restaurants to service stations did. Perhaps they just mass-produce or buy it in in jars, but it all tasted very good.

I recently picked up Michel Roux’s book on sauces and decided to give hollandaise a go. It is difficult to get right. My first attempt was a total disaster as everything separated. On the second attempt, I combined the book with a video tutorial to better results.

I cooked it over a ban of barely-boiling water to keep the temperate as low as possible. It is hard work. You have to whisk for five or ten minutes, then gradually add the clarified butter while you continue to whisk even more. Next time I might do this final whisking using my stand mixer, but that isn’t really an option while you have it over the heat.

I ended up with a super-thick sauce that could easily have been mistaken for a custard. Next time I might add a little more water.

The result is something special though. We didn’t even have a dinner to eat it with: we just spread it on bread and ate it, and it was delicious.

Many restaurants fail to make a good peppercorn sauce. You are served a watery gravy that looks like it might have been near a peppercorn once, perhaps long ago. I did not have a particularly good recipe myself though so I set out on a quest to come up with a better one.

Looking back now, I realise how dull my life really is. It comes with a good sauce though.

The photo shows a few of the iterations. The one on the right is the final champion.