Happy New Year! I hope you have some great ideas or new habits for 2018 that you would like to introduce to your everyday life. I will start the year with interesting post series where we will talk about sauces, these basic elements of cooking in a bit more detail. Everything starts with Roux.
What makes a sauce?
A good sauce will cover your food instead of running off of it like water. To get a thick sauce, you can use three techniques: the process called reduction when you cook down the liquids to get the water evaporated or an emulsifier. But some of the liquids need extra help to reach this texture, and this is where we need to introduce roux which is a thickening element with fat -normally butter- and flour. When the roux is combined you can add the liquid then everything comes to a boil, the roux thickens the liquid and you end up with sauce.
So for 100% success, we will need to prepare a good roux before starting to talk about the 5 mother sauces of French cuisine.
Roux is made from equal parts fat and flour. The classic version is made with clarified butter: pure butterfat after the milk proteins and water are removed from whole butter. It can be heated to a higher temperature without any problems. Of course, you can use whole butter as well, just make sure you don't let it turn brown while melting it!
Clarified Butter - Photo by © Reka Csulak
Ingredients
- 1 part of clarified butter - in grams
- 1 part of flour - in grams
Instructions
- Melt the butter.
- For clarified butter: skim the foam.
- Stir in the flour.
- Cook it till the desired colour. The texture should be like a good porridge.
Roux - Photo by © Reka Csulak
