Sauce Americaine: The Mother Of All Seafood Sauces ( made with crabs)

welcome back everyone welcome back to the channel my name is stefan this is the french cooking academy and the first thing i would say is wow now look at this table i love when i've got a table full of lovely ingredients the reason for that is that today we are making the famous american sauce called in french the sauce americana this american sausage sauce american is full of seafood flavor and it packs a real punch as you can see here we are taking out the big guns today look at that i've got the massive pan the rondo i've got fresh crabs lots of them homemade fish stock we're gonna use fish bones i've got the white wine i've got cognac tomatoes olive oil garlic it's gonna be full of flavor if you want to know how to make it just stay tuned welcome back and thanks for joining so the american source why do we have that name in france why do we have a source called the american source or source american that's what it means well the story is that apparently in 1860 a cook called piafras was working in the united states in chicago for some time and after a few years he decided to come back to france and be the head chef of an establishment called peters in paris in 1860 pictures was actually a really fancy american style restaurant which was all about you know the big show the big dishes everything was made like you know the american dream in mind you know you would go and eat it and it was ultra ultra popular in the high society to the point that apparently there was even crocodiles live crocodiles in basin turtles and even a small bear walking around eat food scrap in the restaurant that was that kind of crazy atmosphere and that head chef that came up from america of course one evening had a late guest that came when everybody was almost gone in the kitchen and they insisted on eating in a restaurant he didn't have much reason maybe i can fix something with fish so they went and sit the guy went in the kitchen and when he opened the fridge it was not much fish but only lobsters left and his idea at a time because he had nothing else he decided to chop on some lobsters throw them in a pan with oil some garlic tomato cooked them with some cognac some white wine add some fish fema and created a dish with a sauce and when he served that with the lobster and the sauce the guests were amazed what on earth is that sauce how do you call it and he said uh apparently he was a bit still in the american mind and he didn't know what to say and at the time apparently it seems like he said oh well it's an american style sauce so it just made something up apparently but take it with a grain of salt because there's also other versions that goes around it we don't have time to go over that but that's for the origin now let's start cooking plenty of work today to do let's go now let's start by making the fish stock or the fish female it's very simple actually to make it only take 30 to 40 minutes so we're gonna be using a bouquet garni a mix of carrots onion and shallots i will put the details in the video description a bit of butter and half a glass of wine at 100ml of wine that's it all right fish stock very easy i put your heat on medium i'm going to start with our butter in here preheat my pan already and first melt your butter as soon as your butter is foaming get all the vegetable carrot onion and shallots and we're going to let them sweat for just a few minutes without coloration after a few minutes take all of your fish bones i've got about a kilo of bones put them in and it's simply the matter of steering them across and to make sure you've got all the onions and carrots going through and so you do that's very slowly avoiding having all the bones falling over next you add your wine and you're going to leave it to cook for one minute after the wine you add three cups of water so i already added one cup in there that's the second cup and i'm gonna finish with the third one finally the final touch as always uh bouquet garni in and you're gonna bring this to the boil and as soon as it reaches the boil you put it down to a simmer and you're going to leave this to simmer for 30 to 40 minutes now as you can see it's a very simple process to make a fish stock and it's a great thing when you feel that fish you yourself always use the bone to make that because you can either keep it or use it straight away to make a sauce which is exactly what we're going to do so i'm going to put this on the side and we can move on to the rest of the recipe and now let's make the crabs so i did say in the beginning of the recipe that this sauce american american sauce was made with lobster which is the initial version of the sauce that was made but in fact the technique is using a crustaceaus and that is cooked in olive oil tomato with female you know cognac and wine etc etc with some shallots but you can use all types of things you can use actually crabs lobster or even scampi's lobster for me was too expensive so here i am with my blue swimmer crab which is an australian type of crabs and i'm sure in your country you can use mud crabs white crabs or any type of crabs you can have in all the ocean this is how we prepare here the crab if you've never seen that we need to clean them first and these are females and that bits you don't want so you kind of chop it off chuck it in the bin and here you put your finger in between you try to detach the actual top shell by pressing like that slowly okay and when it comes out you simply pull like that to reveal the flesh that's inside so do you put this on the side for now next you got your crabs these are the gills you don't want to eat that so you're gonna take them off and clean them and you do the same on the other side next when you got your crab like this if you want you can still remove this little bit that you don't eat and we're going to cut the crab in a few pieces because i'm cooking it i'm not going to butter too much and take a big knife first half like this and then i'm just going to do another half okay so i take my crop piece here the knife down press firmly and there we got it so you're going to repeat the same process for all of your crabs or whatever crustaceans just clean them and prepare them and chuck them in pieces now the crabs are ready i can show you this little thing when i keep on saying all the time do remove the scum at the top of any like stock anything like that this is a perfect example look at the amount of impurities and this is all of these things that you're going to discard so i'm using a skimmer like that and very gently you try to remove all the impurities as much as as much as you can after 30 minutes my stock is done so you first remove most of the bones with a tongue and then we're gonna filter everything into another pan filter the stock and that's it we're done huh the fish stock or the fish female is ready and now we can start cooking the crab and making the american sauce now let's start the americans as a rough guys this is what we're going to be using and you got a mix of carrots shallots onions the bouquet garnish salt pepper cayenne pepper a bit of wine cognac the chopped tomatoes the crab meat i've got the female on the side and most important you're going to need one of these a wood or the mortar a mortar that you're going to use to crush down the carcasses while cooking very important so take this a big spoon or anything you have we're going to need this for the sauce now let's do this we're going to start by putting a lot of olive oil in our water this special casserole pan is an essential cookware to have when you cook french a bit seriously it's 28 centimeters about like 12 inches in diameter it's really good because it gives you that large flat surface that you can use to fry things and here's the crabs that we're going to put in first so make sure your oil is nice and hot of course and then you put all the crabs in when the crabs are in you start with a bit of salt and pepper not too much salted because they come from the seed the crabs aren't so they're really salty but just a hint very good so after two or three minutes um take a strong spoon i'm just gonna turn them over to make sure they color nicely and that kind of nice orangey color all right so as soon as we've got the color put the heat on low again because we're gonna just mix the carrots onion and shallots and let them sweat a little bit and with this crab oil so just a few minutes without coloration for the vegetables and now we have to do the flambe next so you put the heat on high it has to be very hot and we're going to be using a lot of cognac 50 ml and try to lead it up so your pan has to be hot and i'm going to try to do that quickly you pour quite a lot of cognac in and you're meant to yes lit it up perfect so as soon as the flames are gone mix everything well smells beautiful and you get that lovely cognac smell absolutely adore that smell and you're gonna add the white wine so the whole glassing and leave it to reduce for about three to four minutes okay we're ready to pour the stock in so let me just have a little taste that's pretty good okay stop being excited now it's time to add the fresh fish stock in so all of it and we're gonna wait until this goes to the boil before we add the tomatoes we've reached the boil i've turned the heat off otherwise there's too much smoke can't see anything so bouquet garni in a hint of cayenne pepper in there mix well and then we're gonna add 400 grams of chopped tomato i use tomato in cans because it's not the season here but if you have fresh tomatoes you can 400 grams of fresh chopped tomatoes once everything is in we're going to leave that sauce to cook for 20 minutes on a simmer before we can start crushing the crab shells after 20 minutes uh it's time to crush the crab shells or whatever shells you use now in the escoffier book uh he's using a lobster and he would have removed the meat of a lobster and be left with just the carcass so there's no waste you can just crush them in france we use these very tiny crabs and there's no meats in there that you can really extract now here with these blue swimmers first time i use them i realize that the problem that i've got is that there's still some meat so i can i'm gonna crush everything for the demonstration but so just that you know if it feels like a waste you could reserve some of the clothes on the side to serve with the sauce now personally i've kept two uh fresh whole large size blue swimmers to serve with the sauce so i'm going to go ahead and using a peanut mortar i'm going to take everything off the pan and crush everything alternatively you can use one of those and this is a rolling pin and you can directly in your pan just crush but that's kind of harder but you can do that as well after all the shells have been crushed like i did put everything back in at a glass of water and we're going to cook this for on a simmer for further 15 minutes before we're done that's it 15 minutes have passed and look at that nice so let me give a little taste quickly wow now that is crabby flavors so what i'm gonna do now i'm just gonna pass this in a sieve in a clean pan and we're gonna put the finishing touches and once again guys we've done it the sauce american is here and the final touches consist of putting some flavoring with like herbs so you have a choice of parsley or tarragon but most importantly we need to thicken the sauce using the birmani equal amount of butter and flour so it's coffee just to let you know in his recipe goes even further than that he thickens the sauce and also adds some dummy glass to it to give it that uh even stronger intonation and some beefy tasty so it's mixing shellfish and beef but for now we're just gonna thicken that sauce with a bit of garment bring it to the boil and mix until we get the right consistency all right so i've thickened my sauce with the bermanier this is what i get a nice consistency i'm gonna add a last touch of parsley in there so it's some fresh flavors and i'm gonna dress that up on a plate uh with a crab that actually have cooked here um pan fried i'm gonna try to dress it up with the sauce all right so last straw before the lights totally runs out outside this is a the crab with an american sauce on the side so hopefully you can see the the color of the sauce a little bit better remember it's a strong flavored seafood sauce that is served with all kinds of seafood not only crabs or lobster you can serve it with fish fillets with with prawns on the side on a buffet or anything like that it's a very very good sauce i even think that it is so good that you could almost serve it as a little starter as a biscuit like a kind of a thick crab of uh you know crustaceous or lobster soup but that's my little hint anyway that's me out for the day i hope you enjoyed the video and you learned something today and i'll see you all next time for my next video and i think i'm gonna show you something more sweet next time so i see you then bye [Music] you

Channel: French Cooking Academy

Views: 164,812

Keywords: french cuisine, french food, french recipes, French Cooking Academy, sauce americaine recipe, sauce americaine recette, how to make sauce americaine, seafood sauce, american sauce recipe, video, tutorial, french sauce, crab sauce, crab, blue swimmer crab

Id: 5Ie7mRVaXV4

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 15 2018