Another week of culinary adventures has passed, and I must say I'm not all that sorry to see it go. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed each and every class, but this weeks' lessons of stocks and sauces was akin to getting a facial in chicken essence and watching grass grow. Monday was spent making large vats of white chicken stock (beauty shot above) and brown veal stock, and Tuesday filled with the fishy goodness of fish stock, fish fumet (just a boozier version of the fish stock), lobster stock, and the wonderfully stink-free vegetable stock. While Monday's lesson left me with a serious hankering for chicken soup, Tuesday class left me tired (that's a lot of stock to make in one class) and reeking of fish.
After all that toil and trouble, and yes, the cauldron did bubble, it was time to utilize our finished stocks to make yummy sauces! Brown veal stock became espagnole (a brown gravy like sauce), demi-glace (even more tasty), and a bordelaise (so good I could have eaten it with a spoon). The white chicken stock was the base of a veloute, which is just a fancy way of saying thickened meat stock, and a yummy tomato sauce, which would then go on to be the base of a Creole sauce. While the veloute was nothing special, it was then used to make a supreme sauce, which is just a mushroom infused sauce- why they call it supreme I have no idea. The supreme sauce was perfectly yummy just the way it was, but we then used it to make yet another sauce-the paprika tinted Hungarian sauce. In addition to this bounty of sauces, we also made a thickened milk sauce called a béchamel, which was used as a base for two types of cheese sauces.
So after this week of simmering and stirring- and quite a lot of dishes- I am left with a new appreciation for the sauce at the bottom of my place, as well as a refrigerator stocked full of my weeks' hard work. Bon appetit!
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