Sauce Velouté, medium consistency (57) and Sauce Mornay (61)

from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child et al, (57 & 61)

See it on the blog

The great sauce journey begins here. Bear with me, I’m learning, and I’m trying to learn with Julia.

Sauce Veloute (57)

The White Mother Sauces “stem from those two cousins, béchamel and velouté. Both use a flour and butter roux as a thickening agent but béchamel is a milk based sauce while the velouté has a fish, meat, or poultry base” read: stock (54), which is the version I’ll be doing today.

Thin Sauce or soup                        1 Tb per cup of liquid

Medium, general purpose sauce     1-1/2 Tb flour per cup of liquid

Thick sauce                                   2 Tb flour per cup of liquid

Soufflé base                                   3 Tb flour per cup of liquid

And then the mornay sauce is a medium consistency velouté or béchamel with swiss cheese, or a combination of swiss and parmesan mixed in after the original sauce is completed. 

2 T butter
3 T flour
2 cups boiling stock
Salt and white pepper

Instructions for Sauce Veloute from Mastering the Art of French Cooking (57):

1)   In a heavy bottomed [at least] 6-cup saucepan, melt the butter over low heat. Blend in the flour, and cook slowly, stirring, until the butter and flour froth together for 2 minutes without coloring. This is now a white roux.

2)   Remove roux from heat. As soon as roux has stopped bubbling, pour in all the [boiling chicken stock] at once. Immediately beat vigorously with a wire whip to blend liquid and roux, gathering in all bits of roux from the inside edges of the pan.

3)   Set saucepan over moderately high heat and stir with the wire whip until the sauce comes to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, stirring.

4)   Remove from heat, and beat in salt and white pepper.

Sauce Mornay (61)

Now we’re gonna turn that into the Sauce Mornay with the addition of the following:

¼ cup swiss coarsely grated
¼ cup parmesan finely grated
Pinch nutmeg
Pinch cayenne (optional)
1-2T softened additional butter (optional)

1)    Take the sauce veloute you made, and right after it has boiled for one minute, while it is still hot, remove from the heat and beat in the cheeses until melted and blended with the sauce.

2)    Season to taste with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and optional cayenne.

3)    Off heat, and just before serving, stir in optional additional butter a bit at a time, if using. (I didn’t.)

If not using right away, you can pour a thin layer of melted butter, or stock over the top to keep it from skinning over.

So how was it?

The mornay sauce was pretty bland. I tasted it, and maybe it needed more salt, or maybe more cheese, but mostly I think it wasn’t a great pairing with the asparagus, which needed something with more vinegar I think. I thought the Swiss would work with the asparagus and potatoes, but it didn’t taste like Swiss. It seemed on the sweet side, and still smelled like cookies. I’ll keep working on it, and try to bring the leftover sauce back and incorporate it into a pasta with cheese, adding more cheese. Not sure what to use this sauce for, or if I made it right. But it wasn’t quite right for this.

I watched a couple videos. I don’t think my roux was cooking hot enough. I think I needed a more vigorous cook when it was the flour and the butter, but Julia said low, so low and slow I went. I’ll keep learning, but this wasn’t the shit, it was… I swear it was cookie dough. Luke thought maybe I used his Krusteaz pancake mix which we did totally have in an unlabeled Tupperware under the counter, but I know I filled my flour container from the bag and labeled it with my OCD labelmaker. Still, it was weird. And probably wrong.