Culinary School Week #2: Bechamel, Veloute & Pan Sauces and Blanching
My second week at culinary school is over! We made Bechamel, Mornay, Veloute and Pan sauces, blanched vegetables and even made our own butter! Read more about my first week at culinary school here:
Bechamel sauce zen = Roux + Milk (and some cream).
Croque Monsieur sandwich uses a bechamel sauce in the filling and for the topping. See assembly diagram in photo.
We also made several different flavour variants of a mac & cheese using a Mornay Sauce: mushrooms, bacon, smoked mozzarella and other variants.
Morney sauce zen = Bechamel sauce + cheese. In class each team used a different combination of cheese and added pepper & mustard powder for flavour.
We made a pan sauce that used white wine to deglaze a pan with chicken fond, reduced veloute, enriched with cream and finally added some minced tarragon to the sauce.
Pan sauces zen:
1. Degrease
2. Deglaze with: wine, cognac, stock, O.J…
3. Reduce
4. Enrich with: butter, cream, foie gras, dijon, coconut cream, nut butter…
Blanching vegetables zen: drop vegetables into a large stock pot with salty water, cook until crunchy with a bit of give and sink in ice-bath (80% ice / 20% water) for 5–10 minutes until cold. Start from cold water if blanching root vegetables.
We blanched green beans and broccoli. Unexpected: blanched broccoli stems are delicious.
Butter tasting. We tasted about a dozen kinds of different salted and unsalted butters. Each with its own unique flavour and characteristics.
Butter zen: If butter accounts for 5% of the final product (e.g. a pan sauce) you can’t really taste the difference between the most flavour compatible butter for the recipe and other types of butter. If butter is 50% of the final product (e.g. puff pastry) then the type of butter used will impact the final product much more intensely.
New culinary scavenger hunt! Lots of great recommendations for what the culinary and pastry students at SF Cooking School should try out. Having already tried a few places of this list I’m pretty excited to try the rest of it.
Are you in San Francisco and want to see if any of these are near you? I made this handy dandy google map just for that!
Other highlights:
- Science: We churned our own butter starting from cream.
- Cuts: We learned how to round cut carrot and zucchinis. We also learned how to turn potatoes.
- Craig Stoll! Craig gave us an awesome talk about his background, how he opened his restaurants, and where he gets his inspiration from. Great talk and phenomenal human.
