Grand Sauces    

July 21 1998
Whole lot-o-reducing
Damn Demiglace!

The task of the day:

5 sauces

Today we had a long day in the kitchen. We prepared five sauces, but before we could do that, we had to create the things that went into them. For example, the vegetable velouté needed vegetable stock, so of course we got to make that first.

* * *

There are lots of people here taking other classes through the continuing education program. Asian Cooking is running in parallel with my class, and I'm getting to know those folks. A guy from Savanah, GA is pretty friendly, and we've been swapping stories over lunch. Some of the other "professional" chefs are more of a pain. And I thought that egos in the computer industry were bad. Still, I guess it takes all types.

The students here have it even worse than we do. Shawn (our student assistant) is helping out with two of the continuing education classes. He gets here at 5 AM, and works our class until after we leave (which was about 9:30 last night). Today he has a pastry exam, so we were helping him cram last night while we were cooling down the stocks. It's always a good idea to butter up the assistant, you get more stuff that way. He did some Mise en Place for us before class today, which is way cool. There's nothing better than opening the fridge to find all of your stuff on a tray ready to start prepping.

* * *

Today's production list:

  • Demi-glace (1/2 gallon)
  • Vegetable Velouté (1/2 gallon)
  • Tomato Sauce (1/2 gallon)
  • Chasseur Sauce (1/2 gallon)
  • St. Andrews White Sauce (1/2 gallon)
  • Oven-dried Tomato and Olive Oil Sauce (1/2 gallon)
  • Robert Sauce (1/2 gallon)

* * *

Most of these sauces need between 30 and 60 minutes to "cook out". But that's not the problem, obviously. If that's all there was to it, you'd stick 5 pots on the stove and crank up. The problem are all of the things you need to make first.

So there was the vegetable stock mentioned above. Then the tomatoes had to be dried in the oven. Then the tomatoes for the tomato and chasseur sauces needed to be peeled and seeded (4 pounds, please, whee!). Oh, yeah, demi-glace.

I've made demi-glace before, and I don't mind it normally. Normally, you make it as part of a much longer day of cooking. You don't watch it, you just let it burble away while you are busy with something else in the house. Also, there are gobs of shortcuts to making it that produce the same quality product with less hassle or mess. But here, of course, we do things the traditional way. Which is fine. Still. Damn demi-glace. Here we create a brown sauce, from brown stock, roux, mirepoix (browned), and tomato paste. This we cook for two hours. This lets the starch in the flour calm down. This lot is skimmed and strained. Then we add more brown stock to this and cook again, reducing by half. That four hours of boiling, at least, just for the sauce. Of course, don't forget that the stock takes 8 hours. And you need alot of it.

On the plus side, both Sauce Robert and Sauce Chasseur are so good you want to roll in them. And given demi-glace, take about one minute each to make.

Slept like the dead last night. I expect more of the same.

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Copyright 1998 Tom Dowdy