Mother Sauces: Secondary Sauces Part 2b: Mornay Sauce & Sauce Suprême

March 24, 2012 at 8:07 am · Filed under Food Facts - Food History, Sauces-Rubs-Marinades, Tip Of The Day

Become a sauce master: Here’s Part 2 of chef Johnny Gnall’s tutorial on the secondary sauces, featuring Mornay Sauce and Sauce Suprême. Start at the beginning of the article with:

Part 1: The Five Mother Sauces

Part 2a: Secondary Sauces, Creole & Suprême

BÉCHAMEL SAUCE BECOMES MORNAY SAUCE

It’s easy to make a robust cheese sauce from a base of creamy, delicate béchamel (BAY-sha-mell) sauce. Just stir the following ingredients into one quart of béchamel (you can substitute the cheese, e.g., if you want a Cheddar cheese sauce).

8 ounces grated Gruyère cheese

1/2 teaspoon dry mustard

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

[1] Salmon with Mornay sauce (Gemini photo).

In addition to saucing proteins, starches and vegetables—and making a superior macaroni and cheese—it’s phenomenal for dipping hot pretzel nuggets at parties: A crowd tends to form around the bowl.

Bacon Béchamel. If you believe, as I do, that bacon makes everything better, you can go big and cook some bacon to add to the béchamel (finely chopped). Or you can whisk in bacon fat that you’ve previously reserved (I always save the drippings when I cook bacon and store them in a small plastic container that I keep on the shelf of my fridge).

If you’re adding bacon to your béchamel, go lighter on the salt, as bacon has plenty of its own.

If you know in advance that you’re going to make a bacon béchamel, start your roux with bacon, similar to the first step of making tomato sauce. Just render the bacon on medium heat until crispy, then begin to stir in flour to make the roux, and continue with the béchamel as usual.

You may need to supplement with a little butter if you run short on bacon fat and want to create more béchamel.

> See the *footnote for the history of Mornay sauce.

[2] Roast chicken, garlic mashed potatoes and fiddlehead ferns on a bed of sauce suprême.
Photo by JohnHerschell | Wikimedia.jpg

VELOUTÉ SAUCE BECOMES SAUCE SUPRÊME (SUPREME SAUCE)

Sauce suprême is a very rich sauce that adds cream to chicken velouté. It’s the perfect “luxury” sauce for roast chicken or pork. One chef we know calls it “the most upscale gravy.”

Reduce the velouté by a fourth at a simmer, stirring occasionally.

Temper a pint of cream in a bowl. To do this, whisk a bit of the hot velouté into the cream to bring its temperature up. Then add it slowly to the simmering velouté.

Season with salt, pepper and a few drops of lemon juice.

Variations

Mushrooms. To make the sauce even more exciting, turn it into mushroom sauce by adding 4 ounces of sliced white/button mushrooms that have been sautéed in butter. If you add a tablespoon of lemon juice while sautéing the mushrooms, they will stay whiter and make your sauce that much more attractive.

Caramelized Onions. I like to add sweetness to a sauce suprême with caramelized onions (how to caramelize onions). Cook the onions to their sweetest, brownest, softest point (think French onion soup consistency) and stir them into the sauce along with any excess liquid in the pan.

Then use an immersion blender (or countertop blender) to purée them into smoothness. Between the richness of the cream, the sweetness of the onions, and the depth of flavor from the reduced stock, you end up with a unique and complex sauce that works well with any number of proteins, starches and vegetables.

There’s one more mother sauce/secondary sauce tip to go: demi-glace.

________________

*Mornay sauce said to be named after Philippe de Mornay (1549-1623), Seigneur du Plessis-Marly, a French writer and diplomat. The chronological problem is that modern Mornay sauce is secondary sauce of a mother sauce, a variation of Béchamel sauce.

However, the Béchamel sauce in its current, formalized form was not well-documented until later (in the 17th century, and formalized by Escoffier in the early 20th century). A cheese sauce from Mornay’s time would likely have been based on a different mother sauce, like Velouté.

The earliest reference to a sauce resembling Mornay first appeared in the 1820 edition of Le Cuisinier Royal. Philippe de Mornay and his chef, if it was the latter who created the first Mornay sauce, lived in the 16th and 17th centuries and no record has been yet found that references the sauce in their lifetimes. For now, we must conclude that the modern version of the sauce was named in his honor after his lifetime.

Here’s the modern Mornay recipe.

CHECK OUT WHAT’S HAPPENING ON OUR HOME PAGE, THENIBBLE.COM.

Please follow and like us: