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Knowing what a sauce is necessary before you can properly appreciate the mother sauces The richness, flavour, and wetness that sauces provide to a dish are achieved by thickening the liquid. It is common practise to add sauces and gravies to drier dishes, such as grilled meats, roasts, or meatloaf. Standard sauce ingredients include a liquid, a thickener, and a number of flavours and seasonings. Béchamel sauce, white stock, brown stock, clarified butter, and tomato sauce are all examples of French mother sauces that employ a different liquid as the base for the sauce.
The phrase "mother sauces" could come up while watching cooking programes or flipping through cookbooks. The French chef Antonin Careme coined the phrase in the early 1800s when he categorised sauces into the "five mother sauces," a group of five different types of sauces. Hundreds of distinct sauces can be built upon these sauces, which has baffled many inexperienced chefs. You can create your own great derivatives if you understand the fundamentals of each mother-sauce category.
Mother sauces have been around since the 18th century, when there was no refrigeration and food spoiled considerably more quickly. Sauces were frequently employed to mask the flavour of meats, poultry, and shellfish that weren't quite up to par. Béchamel sauce, veloute sauce, brown or Espagnole sauce, Hollandaise sauce, and tomato sauce are the five mother sauces. The term "sayces meres" or "grandes sauces" is also used to refer to all of these sauces combined in French.
Béchamel sauce is white, veloute sauce is blonde, espagnole sauce is brown, hollandaise sauce is buttery, and tomato sauce is red. Each sauce has a distinctive quality. You should be able to identify the mother sauce from which a sauce is derived from just by looking at it.
Mother sauces have endured for so long because they are so adaptable and serve as the fundamental building block for dozens of different sauces. For instance, you can make béarnaise sauce by combining Hollandaise sauce with sliced shallots, white wine or vinegar, and peppercorns.
Béchamel Sauce: White sauce, often known as bechamel sauce, was typically presented to kings or those who were wealthy. The creamy white sauce gave white foods like chicken, vegetables, and eggs a silky finish. It was made with a roux of flour, boiling milk, and butter. Before refrigeration, the average French housewife seldom ever utilised milk products in her cooking.
Veloute Sauce: The "fat white sauce" or "rich white sauce" are common names for veloute sauce. Starting with chicken, veal, or fish stock that has been thickened with a white roux, this white sauce has a blondish hue. Typical variations of this sauce include vin blance sauce, supreme sauce, and allemande sauce (for veal) (fish). For instance, supreme sauce is made from a chicken veloute that has been reduced with heavy cream, whereas allemande sauce is based on veal veloute with egg yolk and cream.
Brown or Espagnole Sauce: The base of this sauce is a dark brown roux, along with beef, bones, veggies, and seasonings. It is warmed, skimmed, and diminished. Tomato sauce is added and the sauce is further reduced after the initial reduction. The entire procedure takes a long time; the sauce doesn't finish for hours or even days. Espagnole sauce has a powerful and concentrated flavour, making it uncommon to serve food with it already on it. Instead, demi-glace, sauce chevreuil, and sauce bourguignonne are frequently derived from espagnoule sauce. As an illustration, demi-glace is created by doubling the Espagnole sauce's volume with veal stock.
Hollandaise Sauce: Rich egg yolk and butter sauce is called hollandaise. Despite producing its own butter for a long time, France imported it from Holland during World War I. The sauce that was once known as "sauce Isigny" changed its name to Hollandaise sauce during this time. The name didn't change when butter production in France resumed. Making Hollandaise sauce requires practice to get it right. The butter must be handled carefully to prevent curdling.
Tomato Sauce: Tomatoes form the basis of tomato sauces. Marinara sauce is a popular tomato-based derivative sauce.
While the mother sauces are the fundamental building blocks upon which many sauces are constructed, there are a few other methods you can employ, such as adding thickeners straight to the fluids left in a pan after sautéing and thickening sauces with vegetable puree or bread crumbs rather than fat. The rich, creamy sauces that were once popular are being replaced by lighter glazes and sauces by today's chefs.
