I'm Frank Provo, professional chef and culinary instructor, and today I'm going to show you how to make five easy sauces. Bechamel, tomato, brown sauce, pesto, and hollandaise. Having these five sauces in your culinary tool belt will make you a better cook. This is how to make five easy sauces. Most of these recipes today are modeled on mother sauces that we teach our culinary students.
They're a great base or jumping off point for other sauces. So when I take my bechamel, I add cheese, I have a Mornay sauce. When I take my hollandaise and I add tarragon, I have a Bernays sauce. So these mother sauces are jumping off points for like thousands of different sauces. Mine's not the exact version or the French version of everything, but we're gonna hit all the high notes.
Bechamel is a basic white sauce. There's only four or five ingredients in this. I don't know how you can beat that.
Let's make the bechamel. We're just going to start on a kind of medium heat, and we're going to add our unsalted butter. The start of this sauce is a roux, and basically what a roux is, some sort of fat and some sort of flour, and it's what we use to thicken things.
You'll start to smell the flour cooking. It'll smell like... baking bread. Just cook that raw flour flavor out. Now that our roux is cooked, you can see that kind of has that nice wet sand texture.
I can add my milk. If you add hot milk to hot roux, it tends to get lumpy. So cold milk, hot roux, and I'm going to whisk it in.
You want to make sure you're always whisking or stirring so this doesn't stick to the bottom. At this point, we're going to whisk constantly or use our rubber spatula to scrape along the edges. I kind of use them in tandem. And bay leaf just gives a nice kind of background flavor. You're not going to taste bay leaf.
I'm going to add just a touch of salt now. Black pepper might be controversial. You're having a white sauce, you're adding black pepper.
And most French chefs will be like, oh, you use the white pepper. I don't use white pepper. I don't like it, so I use black pepper. I'll deal with the spots, it's okay. Whisk as you go, you'll have a nice silky sauce.
And once it starts to thicken, I'll get in there with my spatula, scrape the sides, and I'll just kinda use these both together until I have a nice creamy sauce. When I do this, it flows off of my spatula. If you hear plopping, it's a little too thick. Depending on what you're going to use this sauce for really determines the thickness of the sauce. So if we're using it for something like a croque monsieur or croque madame, you want the sauce to be thicker, so we'll add a little less milk.
But if we're going to use it for mac and cheese, we want to add a little more milk. Good. And I'm going to season it really well right now because I'm going to use this in a lasagna, and I want it to be at its full flavor.
But if you have any lumpiness and it's not super smooth, you can strain it through a fine mesh sieve. But... For our purposes today, I'm putting a lasagna.
I don't need to strain it. It looks great, it tastes great, nothing to be strained. Four ingredients, less than 10 minutes. That is a bechamel sauce.
I think that we can see this in its final dish. It is time to taste, let's get in there. Match made in heaven.
What's great about the bechamel in the lasagna is when you cut into this, you get this nice creamy bechamel and you get the bits and bites of the vegetables and the pasta. It's the glue that holds your lasagna together. Bechamel is one of the easiest mother sauces to make.
You can use it for dozens and dozens of different recipes, especially this lasagna. So we're gonna make my tomato sauce. All these ingredients are fairly simple and it's gonna create a nice full-bodied and rich tomato sauce.
My pan is preheated. I'm gonna add olive oil and then I'm gonna add my pancetta. Pork and tomatoes is a match made in heaven and I'm just gonna I'm gonna let this stir until it starts to get lightly brown.
And the fat from the pancetta is gonna flavor our oil and flavor our sauce. So our pancetta is starting to get light brown. I'm gonna add my onions at this point. I have garlic as well, but I don't wanna add my garlic at the same time. Onions have more liquid, they take a little longer to cook, and if I add my onions and garlic at the same time the garlic gets burnt before the onions start to kind of get brown.
Salt draws out moisture in the onions and let them cook down a little bit quicker. At this point my onions are getting lightly light brown, it's time to add the garlic. So the pancetta and the onions cooked for about seven to ten minutes, not that long, it's on medium heat, and the garlic's probably gonna cook for about five or six, not that much.
We just want to lay those base flavors down and have them and kind of mellow out. It's time to add my tomatoes. I rinse to get most of the tomato off. The tomatoes and the tomato paste are fairly thick. So the water is there to slow down the cooking process.
It's gonna let our sauce cook over a longer time and not over reduce. Now, some people don't traditionally like to add tomato paste. I like tomato paste. It gives a good texture. The bay leaf is just a really nice kind of herbal background.
Basil actually helps your sauce get a little sweeter. It adds some sweetness. The onions add sweetness. The basil adds sweetness.
The long cooking time adds sweetness. Black pepper, lots of it. And a nice pinch of salt.
We can always re-season later. So everything's in there. We're going to let it come to a simmer.
I don't put the lid on tight. I'm going to leave a little bit of space here. So no...
Splatter, it's gonna allow for a little evaporation, but not too quickly, and we're good to go. The sauce is gonna reduce, the flavors are gonna concentrate, and that's what's gonna give us that nice, robust finished product. My sauce has been on a low simmer for about two hours.
Ooh, look at that. You can see that we've got some reduction there. Look at it, it's reduced, it's changed color. It's not bright red, it's a little more brick red now.
Yeah. It's tomatoey, we can taste that pork in there. It's got a nice kind of deep, rich concentrated flavor, and that's what I want. I think this will go really nice with a bowl of spaghetti.
It is time to give this a taste. The sauce is like deep and rich. Come on. You can't beat that bowl of spaghetti.
And there you have it, my tomato sauce, deep, rich, delicious. What exactly is a brown sauce? I like to tell people that its most basic form, it's kind of like a gravy, right?
It's stock, it's vegetables, it's meat and bones, and then you thicken it with a roux. This sauce is super versatile and you can use it in a lot of different recipes. And we kind of start by building layers of flavor.
I'm gonna put some vegetable oil in my pot and I'm going to add my chicken bones. Remember, we're trying to build layers of flavor here. I'm gonna brown my bones, and then I'm gonna brown my vegetables, and then I'll brown my tomato paste, just to give this a nice, deep, rich brown flavor.
I'll probably just use about one onion. Whenever I do onions, I always add a little bit of salt to get some of the moisture out of the onion. My onions are starting to get caramelized. I can start to add my aromatic vegetables, like carrots and celery.
When we get to the finished sauce, we wanna taste chicken. We wanna taste those nice, roasty brown notes. One of the things here that I like to look out for is some brown crustiness on the bottom of this pot.
That's called the fond, F-O-N-D, and we want that. We don't want it to burn, we want it to be nice and brown. So you wanna continue to stir so we get some nice flavor. Everything in the pot's getting to know each other. I'm gonna add my tomato paste at this point.
It's gonna give our sauce a little body. It's gonna add a little bit of sweetness to our sauce. But most importantly, it's gonna help with that nice brown caramel color. We lightly brown as we go.
I'm using brown chicken stock here. If you don't have brown chicken stock, you can either make that at home or you can just use regular chicken stock. We'll let it simmer away happily, getting some flavor for about 30 minutes. And then we'll move on to the next step of building the sauce.
My sauce has been happily bubbling away for about 30 minutes. If you look at it, my chicken bones are starting to break down. My vegetables have gotten really soft.
Oh, it's nice. So far, it tastes really good. But I want it to be a little deeper, a little richer.
And the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to thicken it with a roux. We're going to start out with a pan and some unsalted butter. I want the butter to melt.
And then when I put the flour in, we'll get it nice and brown. Add our flour to it. Brown butter, brown flour gives us a nice, nutty, kind of toasty background. With a roux, usually it's equal amounts by weight. So right now, our roux looks good, kind of peanut buttery.
It smells nice and nutty. It's gonna go right into our stock. You can see that it's starting to get some texture from that roux, and I love that, right? Leave it alone now, let it simmer away happily. We're gonna move over here and make a sachet.
Thyme, some parsley stems, a bay leaf, and some peppercorns. Whenever you want to not have to search around for spices in your sauce or stock, make a sachet. It's a little bit of cheesecloth. I make it into kind of like a burrito, and I have a lot of twine here. Get it tied off.
You can dunk it in like it's a tea bag and just let it sit in there. Everything's in the pot. It only needs one more thing and that's time.
So we're gonna let it go for about an hour and then we're gonna come back and see how it tastes. Look at it. It's brown. It's rich.
And that's what I want. It's gonna be so good. First thing I'm gonna do is take out this sachet and then you can just discard.
And now we're gonna strain it to get all the bits and pieces out. We want this to be a nice clear sauce. I'm just going to kind of move it lightly just so that the sauce drips through. It is beautiful, right?
It's clear. It's thick. It's got some beautiful brown roasty color to it. Give me a straw.
It's plated up with a really nice piece of roast chicken. It's time to taste. What I love about this sauce is that it's delicious by itself, but it's also a good start for a lot of different types of sauces. It gives you a lot of versatility if you just start with this basic sauce. Pesto is one of those sauces that you can swap a lot of stuff out, right?
If I don't have basil, I'll use arugula. If I don't have parmesan, I use pecorino. So it's a very versatile sauce. You can do a lot of different things with it. And depending on where you are in Italy, you'll see different versions of this.
I'm using a food processor today. You can use a mortar and pestle, which is super traditional, or a blender if you want. Mortar and pestle is a little on the chunkier side, whereas a blender makes it a little too smooth.
But I find that the food processor gets me the best texture. I'm going to add some Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. I'm going to add some... Some pecorino, couple of cloves of garlic.
Walnuts are in there. Now, traditionally we are going to use a pine nut for this. Walnuts might not be traditional, but I like them better here.
And it's a great approximation of the pine nut. Walnuts are a little cheaper, a little easier to find. You use them in a lot more recipes than just pesto.
Some salt and pepper as well. And then we're going to add some oil. We don't want this to be wet. We want it to hold together as a paste.
This nice kind of spreadable thick consistency is where I want it. It's really good. One of the things I like to serve pesto with is gnocchi, and that's what I got here, and it's time to taste. That sauce, Madonna mia, it's good. And that is my pesto served with a little bit of gnocchi.
It's fresh, it's delicious, it's easy. You can't go wrong. Make yourself some pesto. If you've ever been to brunch and you've had Eggs Benedict, you've had hollandaise sauce.
But what is it? Most people probably don't even know what goes in it. So I'm going to demystify that for you today. It's super simple with a little bit of technique. First thing I want to do is separate my eggs.
just want to use the yolks. So just separate your whites from your yolks. What I'm going to add to my yolks right now is a little bit of water, a little bit of lemon juice. When I squeeze my lemons, I always put this cut side against my hand. And then I give it a squeeze.
And you can see that it runs down my finger. Start out with some salt and pepper. So now we take this whole assembly and we put it on our double boiler. A double boiler is for gentle cooking.
You can melt chocolate like this as well. But for the most part, we just want nice gentle heat. But the last thing we want is scrambled eggs. And if I see that it's cooking a little too quick, I could take it off the flame, let it cool for a second or two, and then go back on. I know it's ready to add the butter when I see it.
My bubbles are really small and my yolks have gotten really thick. So you can see that we're getting a nice ribbon there and that's what I'm looking for. Take my towel.
I'm just gonna put it over the pot. So this not only holds my bowl in there and keeps it stable, it also keeps my sauce warm, right? We're just gonna whisk in our butter and drizzle it in slowly. This is an emulsified sauce. You're putting two things together that don't normally go together.
Basically oil and water. If you do it all at once, it's basically scrambled eggs floating around in butter, and we don't want that. I have some milk solids here and butter fat. Traditionally, people will clarify their butter where they're just using the fat of the butter.
But the milk solids to me have a little flavor and I want some of that flavor in there. Whisk so that we keep some air in there. We want it to be a nice, light, creamy sauce. All right, butter is in. Let's taste it for seasoning.
A little more pepper, just a pinch of salt, and a little fresh lemon juice and we'll be good. The sauce is so good, I need to find something to put this on stat. I luckily found a nice plate of steamed asparagus to put my hollandaise sauce on. The great thing about this sauce is that it's buttery, a little lemony, light and fluffy and delicious.
And it goes well with so many different things. We made five sauces today. We made bechamel, tomato sauce, brown sauce, pesto, and hollandaise. and if you can make these five sauces and get these down there's nothing you can't do in the kitchen