What the recipe doesn't tell you
Sauce Making
The five foundational sauces of classical French cuisine from which all others derive: béchamel (milk + white roux), velouté (white stock + blond roux), espagnole (brown stock + brown roux + tomato), hollandaise (butter + egg yolk emulsion), and tomato sauce. Codified by Escoffier, each spawns dozens of derivative 'daughter' sauces. The system is a framework for understanding how any sauce works: a liquid, a thickening method, and flavouring.
Lumpy béchamel from adding milk too fast. Under-cooking the roux — raw flour taste. Over-heating hollandaise — eggs scramble above 75°C. Not skimming velouté and espagnole — impurities make them cloudy. Treating the sauces as recipes rather than frameworks — the value is understanding the principle, not memorising ratios.
Béchamel: white roux cooked 2-3 minutes (no colour), milk added gradually, simmered 20-30 minutes to cook out raw flour. Velouté: blond roux with white stock (chicken, fish, veal), simmered and skimmed. Espagnole: dark roux, brown stock, mirepoix, tomato — reduced by half over hours. Hollandaise: clarified butter emulsified into warm egg yolks over gentle heat with lemon juice. The system matters because understanding the mother sauce means you can create any derivative: béchamel + cheese = Mornay, velouté + cream + mushroom = supreme.
The complete professional entry for French mother sauces: quality hierarchy, sensory tests, cross-cuisine parallels, species precision.
Read the complete technique → Why it works →