Beth Has a VD (A Guide to Sauces)
Written By: Alexandra Perez-Urbina on Wed, Oct 8th 2008
When I was but a baby in the kitchen (Freshman 1), we were introduced to culinary techniques. The first few classes were all about knife skills, and we all tried so very hard to make the perfect julienne or brunoise or batonnet. The instructor would walk around and show us what we were doing wrong (my knife was always in an angle, so I couldn't get uniform potato planks to make my batonnet strips). At the end of the day, like eager 5-year-olds, we'd bring our prized cuts over to the instructor yearning for a good pat-on-the-back, after all, our virginal index fingers, unused to the roughness of repeated chopping, were blistered from three hours of labor.
Class quickly progressed into stocks and then sauces. A great dish, whether it's meat and potatoes or a vegetable medley, has to have a strong foundation. Having studied music all my life, relating it to food, I have concluded that the subject of the meal, for example steamed salmon with a mushroom risotto and asparagus lightly sautéed in butter, is the harmony, the root, the base upon which the melody is based - the sauce. Without the foundation, there is no sauce. The sauce's job is to compliment, moisten, and enliven the dish. What is a harmony without a melody or a melody without a harmony? Mostly drab.
In French cuisine, there are almost six mother sauces, and using an acronym that works well on the twisted minds of us cooks, BETH has a VD (Bechamel, Espagnole, Tomato, Hollandaise, Velute, and Demi-Glace); we were able to remember them without much trouble. Each mother sauce provides a base for compound sauces, and with the exception of the Hollandaise, kitchens can save most of the sauces for later use.
Bechamel is the first of the mother sauces we learned and it's relatively easy to make as the foundation of it is milk and an onion piquet (an onion halve with a bay leaf tacked on with cloves). The four basic ingredients are simmered together for about 20 minutes before the onion is removed and white roux (equal parts butter and flour cooked briefly) is added, and at the very end of the cooking process, salt and pepper are tossed in. Bechamel is great alone, I enjoy the simple flavor on pastas, but it is also the foundation to many cheese and cream sauces.
Espagnole, or Brown Sauce, is made with brown stock (a stock made from caramelized bones) and thickened with brown roux (equal parts butter and flour cooked until it is brown and has developed a nutty aroma and flavor). The Espagnole is a little more difficult to produce than the Bechamel. You have the mirepoix (carrot, celery, and onion), roux, stock, tomato puree, a sachet (a little bundle of bay leaf, thyme, peppercorns, and parsley stems), and salt and pepper. The Espagnole, or Brown Sauce, serves as a base to many meat sauces, and provide a base for the debated D-named, almost mother sauce - the Demi-glace. The Demi-glace is a concentrated sauce made from an Espagnole/Brown Sauce and brown stock reduced by half, then finished with a fortified wine, such as Medeira or Sherry. Many, if not most, of the sauces under the giant Brown Sauce umbrella, are made with Demi-glace.
Tomato sauce is probably the most common of all the sauces, though there are four varieties: classic, basic, fresh, and raw. The Classic and Basic tomato sauces are the more motherly of the four, as secondary sauces stem from those two. The Classic, or Escoffier, is a variation of the Espagnole sauce, and I know that this isn't the most complementary comparison, but I thought that it tasted like an elevated version of the tomato soup in Spaghetti O's... The Basic Tomato Sauce is a "normal" tomato sauce, perfect for pasta! The Fresh Tomato Sauce is - fresh, fresh ingredients from the tomato to the herbs. It is a great summer sauce, especially if you grow your own basil and tomato, the only other things you need are onion, garlic and olive oil. It's cooked for 2-3 minutes and done at the minute, or right before serving. A Raw Tomato Sauce is uncooked; it's usually fresh tomatoes in a marinade, and the most popular example of a raw tomato sauce is the Mexican Salsa.
