When I lived in London in the 1980’s , I worked in the kitchen of a great little wine bar, restaurant. One of the owners insisted that we used Escoffier recipes for many of our dishes. It was a great learning experience, but not very cost effective because of the time and effort involved for a small brigade of chefs! Regardless, the dishes were fantastic and very flavourful.
Loved this comment. I'm wondering how many younger chefs will have the kind of experience you mentioned. From what I have seen in recent years, people call themselves a chef, a sous chef or even a head chef when they have had very little experience, nor worked as part of a kitchen brigade where you had a larder, a sauce corner, a pastry corner, a veg corner etc, etc. Sad really.
I love this channel! It brings classics to the home kitchen in a very understandable way. I have several books covering sauces, including ones dedicated to them, but they are invariably aimed at the professional cook or large scale cooking; so it requires a bit of experimentation to adapt them to modern family sizes. The amount of time it takes to make a sauce may seem like it would make it infeasible for weekday cooking, but that is not necessarily the case: * Stocks can be made in large batches and frozen, I use silicon ice trays or flexible muffin trays. I transfer them to a labelled freezer bag once frozen. * A base sauce can be treated the same way, and then dressed up with fresh ingredients when you need it. You can put a portion of the frozen sauce in a pot on a back burner at low heat with a lid on when you start your cooking and it will be ready to dress up by the time the rest of the meal is done (or use a microwave, if you must). I collect bones from roasts and the like, label and freeze them, and make the stock in a pressure cooker (a lot faster) when I have enough of it --and I have the time for it. After setting it up this is pretty much hands off. To cool down the stock (or sauce) I fill a basin with cold water, ice, and ice packs (I freeze small tubs or bags of [water), I place a clean metal vessel in it to cool down 10-15 min before I need it. I normally leave the pressure cooker to depressurize naturally, so I will set this up as the timer goes off (and cooking stops). Once the stock is ready spoon out the large chunks with a spider or slotted spoon (I place it in a grill tray to retain/collect as much liquid as I can) and ladle the remaining liquid though a coarse sieve placed over a fine sieve (or strain it once cool). Add cold [stainless] whiskey stones to the hot liquid and stir (also occasionality agitate the water in the basin). It takes ~10 min to cool down enough to place in the fridge. Refrigerate for a few hours and then you can remove any fat that has separated. The stock is like soft jelly. If you want to reduce the stock then strain it into a wide pot and simmer it down to your preferred consistency before doing the aforementioned cooling down. When making a roux based sauce I initially add half the flour, cook it to get the colour/Maillard reaction, then add the remaining flour at lower heat. I also add the liquid in increments so as to reduce the probability of lumps forming (I'm taking time to strain sauces on a weekday). I bring the sauce up to heat (while stirring) until I notice a change in consistency, I then turn down the heat (still stirring) , put it on a very low (back) burner with a lid on until I need it (stirring occasionally). The details varies a bit with whatever the cooking times are for the rest of the dish, but faster times require higher heat which in turn requires more active work, and vice versa.
Chapters shortcuts 😀 0:00 Intro 3:26 The components of a sauce 04:52 Homemade cooking stock and alternatives 07:00 Making the sauce 17:47 Tasting notes
Stephane, I greatly enjoy your cooking demonstrations from my small farm, here in the French Alps. The secret of french cooking is to take what you have and make it very tasteful. Peoples follow the rules of old Chefs, but the old Chefs originally purchased the cheapest ingredients and found the ways to make those very flavourful.
In my next life, I think I’d like to be a saucier (Hope I spelled that right!) Sauces are the soul of French food, they can make or break a meal. A good sauce and a crusty baguette and I’m a happy guy….merci as always Stephane !
I've only made espagnole once due to it requiring the most effort and ingredients out of all the mother sauces but this faux espagnole really makes want to cook more with it. What an inspiring video. Great job!
Stephane, I'm a luddite in the kitchen, I've got inferior ingredients also and yet you've got me to make a sauce that has blown my mind😁😁😁 thanks for your clear concise and well explained videos....
Well done giving it a go. Like you I was a neophyte a few years ago. As I got into it more and more I started exploring quality ingredients. Something as basic as black pepper can really improve a dish when you upgrade to whole Tellicherry peppercorns. Same too with whole nutmeg, real cinnamon (cinnamomum verum) from Sri Lanka (Ceylon), etc. I built a small solarium to grow herbs and some veg that are difficult to find where I live. Good quality ingredients plus these excellent instructions from Stephane produce brilliant dishes.
From Lafayette, LA, love the shout out to distinguish this from the Cajun "piquante" sauce I've made many times. I know cajun cuisine a lot better than French, but am loving learning the techniques... although I still can't get over only cooking your roux for just one minute.
This first time I made this sauce, it was my turn to do the kitchen lunch, my chef said.. "very nice.... but next time you do the cooking of the flour a bit longer eh? "... The man had incredible taste buds, he was the only one who picked up on it. It remains one of my favourite sauces and I always make sure to cook off the flour. Great video, brought back some great memories, thank you. 😁
@@shtmouth Definitely light, you're just cooking off the flour taste, do it with your nose, if it smells like pastry, not done, smells like butter, it's ready.it's not like a Cajun roux which is also used to colour the sauce, that's why the timing is important... Too much, it's "burnt", too little and the chef hits you upside the head...😁.
Stephane, your offhand comment about having easy home-grown chervil will get chuckles from several family members here in Michigan. I have many herbs growing like weeds, but chervil survives maybe one year out of three, or four. Precious like diamonds. This year, a good one, just enough for one large pork pie. Your cooking with vinegar is an inspiration. Thanks.
I would like to suggest a video on best practices for preserving your meats, stocks and sauces for later use, e.g. pulling them from the fridge and using them.
Something else is delicious with the Sauce Piquante it's Langue de Boeuf (boiled beef tongue). Thank you for your videos. I am watching them from Caen in France. I think your work is the best way to explain the French culture abroad France. Merci pour ces excellentes vidéos.
I think I could pour that on ice and sip through a straw :) looks good. I am reminded of the vinegar chicken that I made a while ago. And I do have a nice lunch size portion in my freezer that is calling my name.
Forgive me for this, but I have to say it: I have made beef and chicken stock from bones, but none of my vegetables have bones. :) Thank you for the video. I love to cook foods from all different parts of the world, and making stocks/soups/roux, etc., has become the basics of almost all my cooking now.
Love your videos of sauces! 3 questions Stephane: 1) What is toasted flour? Can I buy it, make/store it? 2) Gerkins are sour or sweet? 3) How do you feel about making sauces and then freezing them? Do I sacrifice a lot of flavor (looking for occasional quick steps when I don’t have any time)? Thanks!
1 toasted flour : take sauce pan add a few tablespoon plain flour in it put on the stove on medium heat and wait until it start browning keep on stirring with a spoon until you get a uniform light brown color gherkins are cornichons they are called sweet and sour gherkins on the jar i have sauce don’t freeze well at all yes you will loose some flavors and certain sauces will split when reheated . you can freeze stock and sauce base like here the « espagnole » i made🙂👍
Is that Raymond Blanc I spot on your shelf? ;) I adore him! Such a sweet chef, man, and mentor. If it is him, I wonder why I've never heard you mention him before.
This is my second time watching this and I had an idea for a modification. This could be converted into a barbecue sauce quite easily. Use a pork based stock, substitute the wine and vinegar for bourbon and apple cider vinegar, and add a dab of molasses. I bet that would blow people's minds at the next cookout.
Nice job Stefan! All the times you show us what is your passion. From your start until now you have been made big and a lot of steps forward. Keep going guy. You worth any 👏
Thanks. You’ve got a great channel here and your love of food is infectious. I love cooking myself and I’ve learnt so much from you over the last couple of years. Keep up the good work.
I'm always stunned about Stephane's fearless approach to present recipes that seem a bit outdated (making a roux is so grandma style) and in the end they all work out pretty well. Yet another proof of the genius of M. Escoffier.👍 Also it makes me smile all the time when - despite Stephane's excellent english skills - some one-to-one translated french (standard) expressions slip in... in my view / à mon avis, in effect / en effet 😁😁 Francophone german here with all the best regards from the other side of the globe 😊
Beautiful, the saucier in a kitchen can make or break a dish I think. I haven't had sauce piquante in quite a while. I know this may sound a strange mix but I used to love it spooned over lamb/mutton with baked eggs. Its all very rich so you don't need much but it makes a great winter warmer. Great video, thank you for reminding me of this sauce.
That sounds great! Question tho…is mutton readily available where you live? I live in the Midwest USA, farm country, but not sheep country. Lamb yes, sheep no.
@@makelikeatree1696 Sorry for the delay in answering, hadn't seen your question. I'm in Scotland where mutton used to be fairly common. But not these days. With more TV & YT chefs using it it is starting to come back, & my local butcher can get it for me, but I have to order ahead. Luckily I also know some farmers & have gone in with a mate to buy a whole carcass before. Luckily I taught myself to butcher when I still hunted. If I cant get mutton then hogget [two year old lamb/sheep] is a good alternative, not as full flavoured as mutton, but still tender like lamb]. I think if more of us keep asking the butchers for it, they'll stark to stock it. I do like goat as well, but feel a little guilty eating them as I like goats when they're alive. 🐑 🐐
Hi Stephane. Brilliant explanation. Thank you. Next time you do a sauce, could you include some hints on storing leftovers and reheating? It seems that no matter what kind of sauce I make, the first day it’s lovely, but then the next day it’s glop. Tasty glop, but glop. I’d really like to sort that issue out one of these days.
@@FrenchCookingAcademy More or less what it sounds like! An undefined, gelatinous mass. I'd just add a little water, put it on low heat, stir like crazy, and finish with butter.
Just re-heat with more liquid and whisk as you are going along/bringing it back to temp. Add as much liquid as needed to your taste. If you stored the meat and sauce together re-heat them separately. If using a microwave use low settings and heat them together bringing them slowly loosely covered to the same temp, I use level 2 or 3 for about 20 minutes, remove the meat and whisk/stir the sauce adding more liquid if necessary. If, for instance, you have meat, sauce and rice, just be patient in the microwave and bring them slowly to temp at low settings loosely covered adding more liquid if needed.
@@zonacrs This is good advice. I would recommend always storing the sauce separately if the meat is sensitive to reheating. Add enough cold water to get the consistency just a little bit runnier than you want it to be in the end. If the meat is something that would overcook if reheated then I slice it thin and add it to the warm sauce at the end (sauce reheats it). Something like a stew or braise just needs a tablespoon or so of cold water (per portion) mixed in before reheating (slowly). If I'm lazy I will mix the sauce, rice, other veg, together, with a bit of cold water and heat it up together (covered on medium-low), then add the meat at the end. Starchy veg, e.g. potatoes, are in my opinion best reheated in either the oven or fried.
I usually use "old sauce" as a base for new sauce rather than something i can just reheat. We can carefully cook up a clumpy sauce and add some flavored liquid to get the wanted consistency
I ususally cook the rue until it's the colour I need in the pan. I thing I was taught some time that you can make rue ahead of time too so then you could have brown and blond rue ready made in the fridge. Why I do this is because the maillard reactions from cooking the flour makes a really nice flavour.
This is an amazing sauce with tenderloin! I have two questions. Would this sauce go with scallops or is it too overpowering? And did escoffier have a sauce for scallops ?
bonjour Stéphane, Comme vous vous en souvenez peut-être, je suis le Cajun (né en Louisiane) et j'ai vécu au Mexique, aux Pays-Bas, en France, en Angola et pendant de nombreuses années au Brésil où j'ai pris ma retraite en 2015. Dans la cuisine cajun notre sauce piquante est en effet un peu plus « piquante que la recette originale d'Escoffier et s'utilise assez souvent avec des fruits de mer notamment avec des écrevisses (écrevisse), des crevettes, etc.
Bon jour! Can you offer any recommendations for substitutions on the gherkins? It sounds like they contribute a textural element that's essential, so I'm thinking along the lines of a pepper, like canned green chiles or even something much more assertive, like a diced habanero -- but I'd like your opinion before I ruin an Escoffier sauce. I just really hate gherkins....
toasting the flour prior to using it in a roux? That's genius and next-level thinking! Any information on how to best toast it? Time/Temperature/thickness/heat source?
Hi Stephane, what do you recommend if this is at home where I would buy pieces of bony meat. Should I still separate meat from bone and do the processes separately?
Stephane, brilliant comme toujours. Any thoughts on how this might be done in a batch and frozen? I could see putting this in an ice tray and freezing it in cubes, storing in a bag and taking what you need to finish a particular dish. Les pensees?
stock and sauce base can be frozen easily but stock is really the on thing that’s time consuming to make . so if anything it is best freeze batch of stocks in ask jars of bags . if you were to freeze the sauce base you would need to stock to it when reusing it as it will tend to become very thick 👍
That's a Mauviel model M'Heritage m250 which is stainless-steel lined. The big makers like Mauviel, Falk, de Buyer, Matfer Bourgeat, Ruffoni, and Lagostina typically use stainless. Mauviel's top of the line M'Tradition is tin lined and so too is Ruffoni's Historia line. Small, speciality manufacturers such as Brooklyn, Sertodo, Rinomata Rameria Mazzetti, Atelier du Cuivre, and Duparquet offer tin-lined and the last three even offer silver-lined, which is more durable than tin and can be heated to much higher temperature than tin's 230 celsius (about 450 f). If you want to see eye-watering priced cookware, check out Duparque's solid silver. I don't know of any current maker that lines with nickel. Appears it fell out of favour when the technology to line stainless to copper was developed - stainless steel, an alloy, is made with nickel. I have seen vintage nickel-lined copper (usually French made from the late '70s and early '80s), and often these have the attribute of being very thick - 3mm and greater. Of course, the thicker the copper the more BTUs needed to heat it to its optimal temperature - a lot of the vintage copper was once used at restaurants which have high BTU commercial-grade burners and ovens. There are not that many who re-tin copper, and I haven't found anyone who offers to re-nickel it, though I reckon there is someone somewhere who has the know-how.
Here's a nice easy way to keep chicken stock in stock (see what I did there?). Roast a chicken in a pressure cooker or instant pot. Carve and serve the chicken, and put all the waste (carcass, wings, giblets, whatever) back into the pot. Cover with water and cook for another hour. Strain. Boom.
I'm not sure you can roast (dry heat) a chicken in a pressure cooker, but I agree with the rest. I stuff my chicken with offcuts of herbs and vegetables before roasting (in an oven) all of which goes into the pot (with the bones and additional herbs and veg). I also freeze the [cut up] carcass and bones from when I break down a raw chicken. Roast chicken gives flavour, raw chicken bones adds body. I have in the past roasted a chicken for the express purpose of making stock (of course the meat gets used for other things).
@@Swim2TheMoon I think your underlying point, and I concur, is that there is still a lot of value in them old bones. Although as wet cooking already extracts a lot of the goodness into the water a dry method, like a roast, would be best when salvaging from a cooked product.
Réduire de moitié 2 décilitres de vinaigre, additionnés de 2 cuillerées à soupe d'échalotes finement hachées. Ajouter un demi-litre de sauce demi-glace, donner 8 à 10 minutes d'ébullition à petit feu. Compléter, hors du feu, avec 2 cuillerées de cornichons, persil, estragon hachés. Cette sauce est surtout indiquée pour la viande de porc bouillie ou grillée. Ellg sert aussi pour le boeuf bouilli et émincés de viande de boucherie. So, I didn't sow a white wine in Escofier recipe.Or I missed something?
Forgive me for English is not my native language. Gurkins are only pickled cucumbers of can they be fresh too? (is seems to me you are using pickled). tks
