The White Sauce

I'll never forget this one time I went to Il Terrazzo Carmine, an Italian restaurant, in Seattle with Pierre and Stephane. This waiter came to our table, spewed off some of the specials for the evening in what sounded like English. We turned to each other and all admitted, we had no idea what he said to us, and we doubted whether even he knew what he just said to us.

I was determined to figure out what all those crazy terms meant. That was when I started to study cuisine, not just Italian or French but all cuisine. Let me just say its taking a long time.

I realized that food isn't just about recipes. Food is about history and culture. Once I began to understand how some of this stuff came about and how one thing is a building block for another, things started to make a lot more sense (very engineering like, I'm often surprise there isn't a profession called Culinary Engineer). The first thing I've discovered is the importance of The White Sauce.

Of course there is a story here too. I was craving for some New England Clam Chowder one day, being from the East coast of North American and all... I had some clams and some milk so I thought sure why not give it a try? So I boiled up some milk, poured in the clams, and then I realized it was way too watery, so I thickened it by creating this slurry of cornstarch and water. Let's just say, this didn't turn out very good. After being forced to pour this down the drain, I decided I should probably do some research for next time.

Turns out New England Clam Chower is usually made from a roux. A what? Roux, it's French, and it is pronounced like "ru" in English. Roux is actually ridiculously easy to make. The ingredients for a roux is just fat + flour. People typically use butter as the fat. Oils are also fats. You can use unbleached or bleached flour. I usually use equal portions of butter to flour.
The fat acts as a way to enrich the flour, holding it together so that it can cook, and adding flavor to it.

In a small 5-8-inch sauce pot, melt the butter on low heat (about a 2 setting). Take the sauce pot off the burner then mix the flour in. Stir with a spoon. After about a minute or two you'll get a playdough like texture. Put it back on the heat, you want to cook this for a few minutes, keep stirring, but don't overcook it. Probably only for 2-3 minutes is usually sufficient. The goal here is to just make sure that the roux doesn't taste like raw flour. Boil up some milk. And slowly pour the milk in, using a whisk at the same time. Add milk depending on how thick you want the sauce.

After you're done, you now have a Béchamel sauce, it is one of the Mother sauces of French cuisine. A Mother sauce is the basis for hundreds of other sauces. If you add some parmesan cheese you have Mornay sauce (which can also be used on popular American dish Fettucine Alfredo). Those cream sauces aren't made with pounds and pounds of cream, although they feel like it in your mouth. The flour acts as a thickening agent and as it warms up it blends with the milk. It is important to use warm milk otherwise the heat difference will cause the flour to not merge with the milk as a result of the temperature change.

Storing the White Sauce is easy. I don't make it with too much milk, and usually I end up with just enough to fill one mason jar. I put this into the fridge. Then when I need the White Sauce to make another type of sauce, I take a spoon full of it, warm it up in a sauce pot and add more milk and whatever other ingredients are needed to make this new sauce. I find that I can keep the sauce in the fridge for up to two weeks and it makes about 5-7 meals worth of sauces.

This is an important sauce, from this sauce you can even make curries! yummy curry...