Mother sauces and their many offspring

As somebody who’s chosen to leave behind the world of financial journalism behind, I thought I’d never have to hear the word derivative again in the vocational setting.

Which was true until today, when we began working on derivative sauces, which are the progeny of the withered yet toothy matrons of the culinary world, the mother sauces (also known as grand sauces).

There doesn’t seem to be much consistency on what constitutes a mother sauce. Some say there are five: béchamel, veloute, espagnole, classic tomato and hollandaise. Others think hollandaise is a bogus addition, since it doesn’t include roux (flour and butter), doesn’t store well, and is not made in advance of service. The underappreciated master of French cuisine, Marie Antoine Careme, apparently considered Allemande a grand sauce, though most others (including my professor, Chef M) classify it as a derivative sauce. And so it goes.

But regardless of what is in the mother sauces, here’s what I’ve learned in class about classical sauce-making: it takes a friggin’ long time. The process can easily take days, using gallons of liquid and pounds of ingredients only to produce a quart or two of heavily reduced muck. Great-tasting muck, though the work involved has over the last couple days turned The Aspiring Chef into The Perspiring Chef.

Most sauces are begun with a stock (roasted bones with mirepoix and sometimes roux, then strained and reduced). The stock is then cooked with more roux, other ingredients, and reduced further to create a mother sauce. The mother sauce is then combined with other ingredients (and perhaps other sauces) to make one of its many twisted, inbred offspring, also known as a derivative sauce. Similar to the Book of Genesis, there are literally hundreds of derivatives that were borne from the five or so humble mother sauces.

Home cooks probably need to know little of this. More important is to chant two mantras. First, don’t skimp on the salt. Nearly every sauce my team made this week at culinary school was deemed either “somewhat” or “definitely” underseasoned, and I am not shy about using salt. If you think you don't need more salt, you probably do. And then some.

The second matra is don’t forget the butter. This is especially true when finishing off the sauce (known as monte au beurre to the cheese-eaters). Finishing a sauce with butter multiplies the sauce’s awesomeness exponentially, as I witnessed in the Forestiere sauce we made today. Good god, it was smoother than a Wall Street broker hawking collateralized debt obligations in 2005.

Of course, who has time to do all this? Well, Chef Mike said we should make the mother sauces ahead of time and freeze it in thin Ziplock bags, so they are easy to defrost and can be used to make the better derivative sauces. So that means making a great sauce only takes an hour or less when cooking dinner. Provided you are liberal with the salt and butter, of course.