Old-school sauces with a modern touch bring these traditional dishes to life
I found an old photograph of myself in chef’s whites the other day. Looking awkward, holding a huge kitchen knife (wrongly), smiling unconvincingly at the camera. My guess is it was taken when I had just realised a chef’s life was not for me. It had dawned on me that the strict schooling had little to do with the relaxed, everyday stuff I really wanted to cook. I have come to regret those years I spent making the classics, the espagnole, demi glace and mornay sauces that I would, the occasional cauliflower cheese aside, never meet again until today.
The old-school sauces of the French kitchen are about as fashionable as a vol au vent at a wedding, but I am unconvinced we should consign them all to the dustbin. Take sauce soubise, made from onions that have been cooked very slowly without colour then used to flavour a white sauce. One of the most useful and frankly delicious sauces of all time. In her fascinating and meticulously detailed handbook Lateral Cooking, Niki Segnit describes soubise as “one of the many casualties of the roux’s general unfashionability”. She is bang on there, but she has reminded me of its charms. I think of soubise as the cashmere jumper of sauces. Nothing can compete with its soft, cosseting qualities. It is just the job with roast chicken or boiled ham, but is never more perfectly matched than with lamb, when it mingles on the plate with the meat’s own roasting juices.
Continue reading...from Lifestyle | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2YvGPBA