Good morning, everyone.
Welcome back to Le Taillevent. Today we'll continue on the topic we began almost a year ago on mother sauces. We left at the brown fonds,
generally sauces based on meat, we briefly introduced
mayonnaise and today we'll be talking about another great classic: bechamel in classic
version and in some of its declinations. Let's start with the ingredients. You understand you're in France when you open the fridge
and you're submerged in butter. The butter we're using today for bechamel is from a couple,
husband and wife, who own 10 cows and they make
an exceptional butter. Bechamel is a white sauce and the basic ingredients are milk, butter, flour. The flour we're using to make bechamel is a French 45 type,
which is equivalent to a 00 in Italy. It is then seasoned with salt, pepper and nutmeg. In the most classic version, which is Escoffier's one, we'll also find onion and veal, that got lost with time. The base for this mother sauce, just as we've already seen for fonds, is roux. It can be white if the butter is simply melt and incorporated with flour, blonde if we start giving it a light blonde color, lightly caramelized, and brown instead, when this caramelization, this toasting is a bit more prolonged. In this case, we'll be making
a blonde roux, as it gives to the bechamel an aromatic complexity that is a bit more interesting. Let's start with the butter. Here is 70 gr of butter that we'll melt, and we'll add 70 gr of flour. It shouldn't become brown, but start getting a light browning. When it starts lightly bubbling, I'm adding the flour
all together and mixing it well. You shouldn't be scared, because anyway, if you pour everything together at a certain point you see how the fat starts separating from the mass, which is something completely normal. We'll allow it to cook and occasionally stir, so that all the parts of this mixture can brown homogeneously. You can also smell
how the aroma changes from a raw fat butter and we start smelling cooked butter with hazelnuts hints, as clearly the flour, too, starts getting some color. There's two schools to make bechamel. One requires hot roux, and the other cold roux, so as a consequence
one will be with hot milk or cold milk. I personally like to make it with cold milk,
but you can make it with hot milk. What is more important is if one is cold, the other is hot. Hot roux with hot milk: these two elements, together, make it so that the final result would coagulate excessively quickly. Once we smell this aroma of lightly toasted flour, of butter that is slightly brown, let's pour the milk in its entirety. Let's pour everything together and mix. The most common mistake is to be afraid to add the milk all together. We see how many times it was added little by little, but by adding it little by little, the liquid thickens too fast with the risk and the great probability that lumps start creating. Once the roux, meaning the butter and the flour, completely melt into the milk, you have to wait for the cream to coagulate,
and to make it happen you need the milk to boil
together with the roux. You have to count between
3 and 5 minutes before the bechamel starts boiling, and then calculate at least 3 minutes for it to cook to the right point. What is important is, until it gets to a boil, you have to keep stirring to prevent it, clearly, from sticking to the bottom. The greatest risk is, how it often happens, for the bechamel to stick to the bottom instead of cooking, so we'll obtain a bechamel that is still not thickened, because on the bottom a layer has formed that with time gets burnt, so the most important thing is to pay attention and stir, stir, stir, most of all on the borders. Once our bechamel gets to a temperature, meaning it starts boiling, we're cooking it
for up to 3 minutes until we reach the desired consistency. Basically a bechamel should not be a mayonnaise that stays compact, it's not even a whisked egg white. It will have a solid
consistency when cold, but when it is hot it will always stay quite liquid, creamy. In order to understand if bechamel is done, it's very simple: you're immersing a spoon inside the sauce, you're taking it out and sliding a finger
on the back side of the spoon and if the sauce doesn't move it means it's done, because basically, the bechamel should glaze something. Now, off the flame we're seasoning it with some classics, with some nutmeg, I'm not giving grams nor anything, I like the idea that it is always to someone's taste. Clearly, when it's hot, the nutmeg develops all of its aroma. A pinch of salt, and anyway, it should be salted to the right point. We're stirring it. Once it's seasoned, we're tasting it and if we need it, we're seasoning it with salt and nutmeg. Here some salt is missing, so I'm adding some salt. We could also add pepper. I'm leaving it natural, this way as I prefer the pepper not to cook. Either we're using it straight away or moving it
to a tray. If we're leaving it a single minute without stirring it or covering it, it will make a crust, and this crust eventually becomes lumps in the sauce. I stopped stirring it for 30
seconds, and you can see how it starts creating an unpleasant film,
so we're stirring it straight away and you can see
how it becomes shiny again, without any film. Here it is, smooth
and without lumps. It's done. The most important thing, once it's been poured, is to cover it
with film that adheres to it. You don't need 2 meters of film, just a square to protect the surface. If it doesn't adhere, air and bechamel together make a bad match, consequently the risk is for a film and small crusts to create. Until here, we've seen bechamel in its most classic fashion, and we can use it to make lasagne, when cold, to make croquettes, if we want to bread it and then fry it, but just like all of the mother sauces
there's a lot of derived sauces and today
we chose mornay sauce. Mornay sauce is based on bechamel obviously, to which we'll add some egg yolks and hard-paste grated cheese.
The cheese is in this case is comté, but it can be made with Swiss gruyère or with emmenthal. For a bechamel with one liter of milk,
you have to add 80-100 gr of grated cheese. We're stirring. Egg yolks. Let's mix it and it's ready for use. Now, the idea is to present you with a simple use: soak and gratin. In this case, we're presenting you another classic of French cuisine: oeufs Florentine. It's simply fresh spinach that we're cooking in a pan with a drizzle of oil and a bit of garlic to aromatize and just at the end, off the flame, a bit of butter to wilt the spinach even more. We're not cooking it too much,
and we're moving it out if the pot. Once it's ready, we're placing it in a serving plate. We're placing a soft-boiled egg on top. What is a soft-boiled egg?
It's an egg that is cooked starting with boiling water for 4 minutes, so the exterior will be the cooked white and the egg yolk is half-cooked.
Something important for the eggs: I think all of you found some difficulty in peeling eggs. If you leave eggs out of the fridge or before cooking them you leave them out of the fridge for some hours,
so that they get to room temperature, you'll be able to peel them much much more easily. Let's place the egg, take the mornay sauce soak generously and place in the oven or under
the salamander to gratin. When it starts caramelizing a bit on the borders, here we are. Once it is gratin to taste, we're taking it out of the oven and serving it, the dish is done! What is nice is that when we cut into it, we have the soft-boiled egg in the center. Here is when we add some pepper, salt, and then, to finish it with some crunchiness, some bread crusts.
We can clearly add some grated Parmigiano on top or,
why not, serve it with fish, with a prawn, whatever we want,
for example some grated white truffle. It's 11 o'clock, we can have a micro-brunch! The topic we already touched on with the basic mother sauces, is that mothers can be sometimes grandmothers, and at this point there's bechamel sauce, that is the grandmother sauce, that has mornay
sauce as a daughter to soak and, if added with whisked egg white,
will have a souffle as a nephew. To make this preparation, we're moving to the pastry, where we'll find Emilie. Emilie is our pastry chef, who by the way also really helps me in the kitchen. What is most important for a souffle is that the egg whites are delicately whisked, so we can avoid incorporating too much air, because if we incorporate too much air there's a risk that the air bubbles become too large and during cooking, don't support the weight of the souffle. Once the egg whites
are whisked, you can see how smooth they are, because the air bubbles we incorporated are smaller, so we'll obtain a result that is less foamy, but more creamy. We're adding these egg whites in two times in our mornay sauce. The first time, just to make it a bit creamier, then delicately, without deflating them. Once we incorporated the egg whites, we're going to fill our molds that we previously coated with butter and generously floured. After we fill our molds, we're carefully beating the bottom to make the 'bubbles'
that are present in the souffle even, so that once it bakes, it can rise uniformly. Before we bake it, we're adding a small chip of cheese that we grated and I passed through the sheeter, meaning a very thin disc.
We're cutting it with a mold and placing it in the center of the souffle. We're lightly caramelizing the top part under the salamander. When we see it starts developing a bit and lightly fry on the surface as you can see,
now we're taking it out of the salamander so it already lightly caramelized. We're putting it in the oven at 180°C
for 3 minutes on a ventilated mode. As you can see, the souffle rises very quickly. In 3 minutes you'll see how it already developed to the maximum. After 3 minutes, we're taking it out of the oven and you have to taste it
straight away. If you wait for 1-2 minutes before tasting it, it will be overcooked, as souffle stays hot and the cooking
continues, anyway. The ideal for a souffle, be it sweet or savory, is for it to have a crunchy surface
with a thin crust, and inside, when you open it, it is this way, a bit more creamy, as you can see here. Now, this is the idea of a souffle that is more cooked on the outside and with a melting, creamy core. At the Taillevent, we serve it by cutting it and pouring inside a comté sauce. It's already creamy, and by adding the sauce inside, the result is even richer. This is how we're closing this new episode on mother sauces. We already saw how they're not mothers only, and today we discovered how they're not only sauces.
I hope my lecture on mother sauces excited you and gave you new inspiration! See you soon for a new episode!
