The 5 Sauces Every Chef Needs to Learn

In every Michelin-starred kitchen, there's a foundation every chef is taught to master. These techniques have influenced modern cuisine around the world more than any other. Developed by Augusto Scoffier, these sauces aren't just recipes, they're the basis for experimentation and innovation. These are the five mother sauces every chef needs to master. This is the book that most people get when they go to college as the foundations for French cooking and it covers the five basic mother sauces. It basically means there's five different basic sauces which you can use for different types of recipes and different types of variations. Scoffier was a notable chef in France who used to cook for royals, very influential. He didn't just come up with this book, which is like over 7,000 recipes, he also came up with the principles of the French kitchen. It was mirrored on the French military system, so chef de party all the way up to head chef. So first sauce, bechamel. In his book, this is one of the mother sauces because there's so many different things you can do with the bechamel. Get this milk warm. He says to add an onion studded with cloves to add a different aroma. The key principle of a bechamel is it starts with a roux and it's a milk-based sauce. So there's a point of difference between a bechamel and other sauces. Normally the other sauces contain stock, but this is basically just a roux with a flavored milk. So the bechamel sauce, rumor has it, historically was created for Louis XIV. Bringing up this butter to like a light nuttiness. Roughly speaking, it's almost equal parts butter to flour. Cool, and you can start to see where it starts to turn all golden, and that's just the milk solids turning that color. So add your flour now and allow that to cook out. Turn the heat right down, otherwise you'll burn it. And then the consistency that I was always trained to look for is, it almost should look like wet sand. I think it's a nice way of saying it, but it does kind of make sense. Frothy and foamy and also a little bit golden. Always add warm milk to a bechamel, and I think that's where a lot of people go wrong with bechamel. You'll notice that we're not slicing the onion up, so it's actually a very sort of delicate way to flavor up the milk. It's not like loads of slices of onion, so it tastes like stewed onion. And then all of that will lightly season the milk as it cooks. If you're adding a cold liquid into that sauce, what can happen is it'll coagulate way too much, and then it'll take time to bring it back up to the right temperature. And then that sauce will get too thick. So if I added all of the milk at the same time, it wouldn't cook out nicely, and you'd get these like massive lumps. And what happens is when I'm doing it like this, the friction of beating it together gets rid of those lumps. And then you can keep adding little bits of milk until it's the right consistency. If you wanted to just make a white sauce, which we traditionally serve with Christmas pudding in the UK, you'd remove the onions and you'd add a little bit of nutmeg. Or if you wanted to make a Mornay sauce, then once this is cooked out properly, then you add in your cheese. And that would be used to make a lasagna or something like that. It's probably been about five minutes. And what you got this beautiful consistency, quite thick and rich and glossy, but you can also see those lightly browned little bits of butter in there as well. But what we're going to do is quickly turn this into a saucy beast. It's really simple. I've sweated down some onions without any color. So they always talk about with a bechamel line in the back of a spoon, and what does that exactly mean? I trace my finger through it. The line that goes through is perfectly left inside the sauce. So soubise is just one of the variations of a bechamel. So just blending up the bechamel with the onions. The onions are basically all they're going to do to that is just add this really nice sweetness. They're not going to break down fully because they're not properly caramelized. So I'm just passing it for a fine shiv into the same pan that I used before. Okay, so this is our soubise. So just whack it into a pan. Small amount of your soubise sauce. A little bit of leek oil on there now. Just a nice bit of salmon. Nice and crispy. Very simple. It's not going to overpower any sort of flavor. You could add lots of different things to that. Fresh chives at the end. Maybe you could even add a splash of white wine into the base. Number one of mother sauces, bechamel. Right, next sauce. So we're going to do a veloute now. So veloute has actually got very similar principles to a bechamel. It starts with a roux. Probably my favorite of the foundational sauces because it's the most versatile. Whereas bechamel is using milk, here you're using stock. You're not really relying on the butter flavor like you are in a bechamel. You're more reliant on the flavor of your stock or whatever you're finishing your veloute with. So same ratios you've got in there with the bechamel. It should still look a little bit like wet sand, but just a little bit lighter in color than a bechamel. What I've got here is just white chicken stock. Two different types of stock. White chicken stock or brown chicken stock. White chicken stock just means I've not roasted the bones. A much more delicate flavor. The term veloute comes from the French velour, which essentially means velvet. And that's quite a large part of what this sauce is. I mean, when done properly, it's an incredibly smooth sauce and it can look really, really elegant on a plate. So all I'm doing is just adding stock bit by bit. Just like with the bechamel, what I want is, I want something that lines the back of the spoon, so it's got a nice body to it. But at the same time, it's not too claggy and it's got that stunning velvety texture. You could easily turn this into a mustard veloute, add a bit of mustard and serve it with the chicken breast. Okay, so perfect. What we've got here is finished veloute. Super shiny and glossy on the back of the spoon. Still leaves a trace. I've just added a little bit of salt. I'm going to turn this into a herb green sauce. Turn it bright green with a bit of spinach, which I'll just blanch first to release the chlorophyll and a tablespoon of mustard. Easy peasy. Okay, so to finish this veloute, really simply what I'm going to do, some spinach to a pan and blanch it. All you're doing is just look to release the chlorophyll. We'll take that out. Some herbs. So I've got some parsley and I'm just going to pick some tarragon as well. So all onto the same board. A couple of chops and that can all just go into blanch as well. So there's a few more stalks inside the herbs. So just, they'll just need to be cooked slightly longer than you would the spinach. And then these can go into the ice as well. You could use this as the base for a really beautiful fish pie or just a nice fish dish and just squeeze all of the excess moisture out of there. Can be quite liberal with the herbs because it literally does go down to absolutely nothing. Perfect. So that's all our tarragon, parsley, spinach mixed in there. The veloute goes on top. Thermomix is just a high power blender. So you've got this beautiful bright green herb veloute. I'm just going to finish that with a little bit of mustard. That's been blitzing for about two minutes. To be honest, the Thermomix is a really good bit of kit but I've had just as sort of similar outcomes with a Nutribullet at home. So once you've added the mustard in there, that's going to be basically a form of acidity. So typically what you do in restaurants is you'll make the base sauce, which is the herb bechamel and then you'll acidulate it to order. So you'll add a little bit of vinegar just before you send it. Acid in the vinegar gets rid of all the greenness out of the sauce. So best served with some sort of white protein because it's a nice green sauce. I've just got a nice chicken breast here and then just start from the center. Chicken goes on. You could serve that with wilted spinach or anything like that. Tiny little bit of truffle oil. A proper solid dish. But that is just sauce and protein. Super easy foundational sauce. Okay, number three. Espagnol. Actually didn't originate in Spain. It's a French sauce. Basically it just means Spanish in French. Essentially this is just a meat-based sauce. It could be very versatile. First thing in the pan is bacon. Then you're going to add a mirepoix to that. We've got some celery. We're just going to really nicely and very finely chop up. So mirepoix is just the terminology for celery, onion, carrot. Vegetable combination in France. Much as the Italians have sofrito. So dicing up your vegetables. We'll just do half a white onion as well. So we've got this beautiful foaming bacon at the moment. Diced onions go in. And then the moisture from the onions is going to almost deglaze the pan. The reason you're adding all of these different aromats and vegetables is just essentially for sugar. So you want to cook them down. And you can see that we had that bacon fat on the bottom of the pan. And now that's all been rendered away. So now what we're going to do is just add a tiny little bit of color to these onions. Add in the rest of our vegetables. And then we'll proceed to add in our thickener, which is in this case a roux. OK, so we've added a little bit of color to those onions. And most of the residual water has sort of disappeared now. So I'm just going to add in the rest of the vegetables. So in terms of this sauce, this is the base for a lot of other sauces. Say a bordelaise, which has got like mushrooms and a little bit of bone marrow in there. And then something like a chicken chasseur, something like a Diane sauce. So it can be the base of a demi-glace as well. So once all of those vegetables are softened, I'm just going to add in the butter. But I'm not going to go crazy because I've got a nice beef stock here. Just allow that to sweat off. So once our butter's melted, probably added about 50 grams. I'm just going to add just under that in flour and cook that out slightly. OK, so that's cooked out lightly. And now I'm just going to add my beef stock. So I've got a nice rich beef stock here that we use in the restaurant. If you're doing this at home, you could always just use some stock cubes. Release most of the sauce from the bottom of the pan. Just make sure there's absolutely nothing by way of fond left at the bottom. Just reduce the heat right down. Now, what you want to do is cook this for a long time in order to get rid of any sort of flour that's left in there, but also so that the vegetables can release all of the sweetness as well. So it's slightly different to what we were doing with the other sauces. With a sauce like this, it's really difficult because there's different levels of sweetness in different types of vegetables. And that can change depending on season. And a sauce like an espagnole will take a lot more adjusting than just the bechamel or a veloute. When you hear about a saucier being one of the most important positions in the kitchen, I think that's because if you take shortcuts in a sauce, say you overroast the vegetables, or you don't take time to take the fond off the bottom of the pan, or any of those little steps, you can taste that in the final sauce. Saucers will always be tasting their sauce all the way through, not just at the end. This has been simmering now for about 15 minutes, and you can see what's happened. The sauce is reducing. It's really nice and thick, but it's almost got this really nice sheen and clarity to it, which is just the butter and those natural thickening collagen juices from the beef stock. One of the best ways that I use to serve this is like a classic duc à l'orange. The juice of two nice, in-season oranges. If you imagine I've got all my soft vegetables in here, I don't want to get too many impurities in my sauce. So just tapping it by the side. Obviously, the yield of your sauce would be a little bit affected. So just one big push. Don't take it too far. You could wash that again, bring it to the boil, and then put that back into the sauce. That's what they call a remiage. So typically when you're making sauces in restaurants, you would boil all of your sauce for the second boil, and there what you'd get is your Sunday gravy or something like that. Orange juice at the end. It should be thin so that it lines your mouth. And if it's too thick, what happens is it almost acts as a barrier, so your taste buds can't properly taste it. So it's delicious. Does need a touch of salt. Does need a touch of vinegar, just for a little bit of freshness at the end. Consistency of the sauce is nice, nice and shiny. Cooking on the crown, the much more delicate way of cooking the duck. Hose-carved duck is always just down the center. So season your duck all over. Ladle of your beautiful sauce to allow it to cover all of the plate. Boom! Espegnol. Bang him. So next up, what I'm going to show you how to do is a hollandaise, which is actually probably my favorite go-to. I've got egg yolks, vinegar, and what I always do with my hollandaise is add a splash of water into the base. So typically I add about 100 mils to one recipe of hollandaise. Then I heat it up over a bain-marie. Bain-marie is literally just a pan of simmering water with a metal bowl. All we're going to do is just lightly whisk it until it starts to froth up. And then once it starts to froth, we're going to take it a little step further until it turns into what they call a sabayon. You need to keep this continuously moving until it resembles almost like a thick mayonnaise. It starts to get this sort of like thick foam consistency. But you want to keep it going past that. Well, this probably has hit about 74 degrees, which is the temperature where egg yolks start to coagulate enough to emulsify butter into it. The water adds a little bit of stability and the vinegar adds flavor. Now it's got this sort of very thick consistency. And what I'm going to do, turn the heat off, get your pan. You've been simmering away in there. And then place it over there. So this adds stability whilst you're emulsifying your sauce. But it also keeps it nice and warm as well, which will stop it from splitting. And then I'm just going to slowly add my clarified butter. In my honest opinion, clarified butter, how you should technically do clarified butter is skim off any impurity with a clarified butter, especially with hollandaise. I always just melt the butter and add everything in. The reason I do that is because the butter solids have a lot of flavor. I could never really understand why you would take them out. So if it's getting too thick, add a splash of water. Absolutely no problem at all. And then continue until you've emulsified all your butter into it. I didn't add any salt at the beginning because salt into emulsions is typically a similar principle as scrambled egg. The salt sort of holds around the protein particles from the eggs. And it can inhibit the sauce from thickening. So typically to hold a whisk like this, especially if you know you're going to be whisking for a while and you're kind of just lifting it up and adding it back into the sauce. It's just a lot easier on your arm. I've got this beautiful thick consistency. It's nice and pale. So you've got a lot of butter in there. So here's our hollandaise. That's perfect as it is. You can add a little bit of paprika. So bearnaise is slightly different to a hollandaise, but also quite similar in flavor. Very similar in sort of consistency to a hollandaise, but it's just a little bit different in sort of conception. The fundamental principle is they all taste really, really good with steak. Tarragon, it's traditional in a bearnaise. So lots of that in there. Beautiful aniseed consistency. Just a small amount of brunoise shallot. Crossways. So this is a very fine brunoise. It's going to add that sort of like allium hit. And you can see it's still really stable, this hollandaise. So this is our sort of fake, super quick bearnaise based on a hollandaise sauce. My favorite way to eat a bearnaise is with a big, fat, juicy steak. I've got a ribeye here. Cut nice, medium rare. Splash of lemon juice just before you serve it. Big plate of chips. That is an absolute dream for lunch. So sauce number four. Look at that. Absolute beauty. So sauce number five. Our much loved sauce tomate. All I've got in there is some olive oil. This is a nice, sweet French onion. Varying opinions between Italians. How much onion to place inside a sauce on the Goodfellas prison scene. Don't put too many onions. You always put too many onions. From a historical point of view, tomatoes weren't that prevalent in the kitchens in France at that time. Basically, obviously tomatoes came over last out of most of the modern vegetables that we have from South America. I think at the time this would have been a more modern sauce. Lovely white onion. This is a Roscoff onion, so it's a French onion. So I'm just sweating down. My onions and now just one garlic clove in this olive oil until they're very translucent. I'm not doing it very quickly. I'm taking my time. Yes, this is French sauces and French food and French sauces is kind of the, these are the mother sauces of a lot of European cooking. But in Italy and in Spain, they kind of have similar, similar things. A sofrito is basically just a mirepoix, but in a slightly different way. And a sofrito is also used in Spanish cooking as well. So to be honest, it's actually just the Brits that were a bit further behind than anyone else. The French and Italians had it locked down. As you can see, our onions are really nicely sweated down. They've got no colour on them whatsoever, but they're really nice and soft. You've got a good amount of olive oil in there. I'm just going to add in my tomatoes now. Not all of these, just half of that, which is about one litre of chopped tomatoes. You could 100% do this yourself by blanching them, de-seeding them. Let's cut the shit. I know that people do this at home. And to be quite honest, I actually think when tomatoes are harvested at peak time, processed in this way, the tinned tomatoes often have a better flavour than processed tomatoes from the British supermarkets in the middle of December. And then I'm just going to let that cook out. You've got this layer of oil on the bottom. That's absolutely not a bad thing whatsoever. And when you're cooking it out, essentially what you're doing is trying to get rid of some of the loose moisture from those tomatoes. It's basically reducing all of that natural MSG that you get inside of tomatoes to make a really intense sauce. So I don't need to tell you how many different variations you can do on a tomato sauce. So one of my favourite variations of tomato sauce is a romesco. I'm peeling down these peppers. I've just blistered these in the oven. Don't worry if you get a few seeds in there because ultimately this is going to be blended into a really nice puree. I'm just going to take off some of the skin. So this is more of a Spanish variation of the sauce. So typically romesco sauce is found in Catalonia. It's usually served with something like seafood. We're just going to serve it with a little bit of squid. What I always do with tomato sauce is I'll always let it cool down. But if you've not got time, whack it into an ice bath because typically whenever you make a romesco, you're adding fat and it can tend to make it go very pale in colour. I'll typically add all my ingredients into the blender. So that's a good amount of roasted red peppers. Touch more oil. Prep in squid. Knife down all the way through. Remove this inside bit. Then I break it down into little sections that cook nice and easily. Flip it over onto the tough, rougher outer side. Squid can get this reputation of being quite rough, but it's actually just this outside membrane that's really tough. I'm just going to add our cold tomato mix now. Some beautiful almonds, which have just been lightly toasted in the oven. Good splash of vinegar. Some garlic. It's just going to flavour the oil really lightly. Squid goes in. So a good pinch of flaky salt. So particularly with squid, you either want to cook it really, really quickly or braise it for ages. Just colour that really nicely on the pan. Take it off the heat. Get a ladle of juice. Okay, so our romesco sauce should be nice and smooth, but with a good amount of texture to it, because I'm not going to pass this one off like we have with the other sauces. And this beautifully cooked squid. Best just dressed with a little bit of oil. So, sauce number five. Variation on a sauce tomato. Very simple sauce. Basically just a completely basic tomato sauce, but we've turned this into a bit of a romesco, served with some fresh squid. Pleasure.