The Mother Sauces: Velouté/Suprême, Sous Vide Chicken

Next in our series on the five mother sauces is velouté sauce.  Velouté is similar to béchamel sauce in that it's a single liquid thickened with roux. Also like béchamel, you'll see that's it's pretty darn easy to make.

For this post, we'll be making the mother sauce, velouté, a child sauce called sauce suprême, and some awesome sous vide chicken and vegetables.

Part I: Sauce Suprême
Ingredients:
Velouté Sauce
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1 cup chicken stock

Sauce Suprême
1 cup velouté sauce
¼ cup heavy cream
1 tbsp cold butter for mounting

Inspiration for the chicken and vegetables comes from the ChefSteps recipes for chicken roulade and whole poached chicken. The sauce suprême recipe is from a combination of a few recipes + personal experience.

Coq au Vin

Ahh, coq au vin. Literally translated as "rooster with wine," it's a classic dish that exemplifies the marriage of food and wine.

But more importantly, it's an excuse to cook with booze.

This recipe comes from the legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck, but you can also find it here.  If you're wondering if you need this book, here's a simple quiz to help you:

Q: Do you own a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking?

A: Why are you reading this?  Go buy a copy.

Ingredients:

Chicken Ratatouille - From "The Silver Spoon"

This recipe comes from The Silver Spoon, a classic Italian cookbook (and one of the most popular ones) with as much of an impact to Italian home kitchens as The Joy of Cooking is to American home kitchens.
But enough talking, let's get to the cooking!

Ingredients:

Chicken Cordon Bleu...kind of

I need some toothpicks. Or kitchen twine. And breadcrumbs.

Anyways, chicken cordon bleu is fairly simple--get some chicken breasts, cover one side with breadcrumbs (using the flour/eggwash/breadcrumb method), butterfly and pound to a uniform thin length, add ham and swiss, and roll it all up. Oh, and tie it up, or stick toothpicks through the seam so that it doesn't unroll on you.

Fettucine alfredo with chicken

As if that wasn't cliché enough.

I've always wanted to make some kind of pasta dish with alfredo sauce, because I've always heard that homemade alfredo sauce is easy to make, and much better than the jarred stuff.

Well, a lot of homemade things are better than their jarred equivalents, but that's not the point.

Wait, that is the point! Go make your own alfredo sauce after reading this, and you won't regret it (nor will you buy the jarred crap again).

Ingredients:
1 lb Fettucine noodles
~1 lb chicken after skinning/deboning (preferably white meat, but I don't see why dark meat like thighs wouldn't work)
~1.5 cups heavy cream
1 stick of butter (I never said it was healthy, did I?)
Parmesan cheese (don't use the Kraft sawdust--I mean parmesan "cheese")