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.

The Mother Sauces: Béchamel/Mornay, Orecchiette

This is the first in a series on the five mother sauces in French cuisine.  Without delving into a long history lesson, the five mother sauces as we know them today were defined by Auguste Escoffier in the early 1900s.  Escoffier, commonly regarded as the father of modern French cuisine, did a lot of work toward organizing, standardizing, and simplifying the zillions of recipes and techniques of his day.  For more details, here's a great BBC article that outlines some of his contributions to modern cooking and dining.

Most french sauces can be seen as a derivation of one of the five mother sauces (hence the name); if you've ever eaten eggs benedict, mac and cheese, or biscuits and gravy, chances are you've already encountered a mother sauce or one of its derivatives!

In this post, we're going to make a mother sauce as well as one of its derivative sauces, and some food to go along with it.

Part I: Béchamel Sauce

Ingredients:

2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1 cup milk
pinch of nutmeg (optional)
salt and white pepper, to taste