Sauce Espagnole and Beef Stew

Sauce Espagnole. Also known as "brown sauce," it is a strong-flavored, rich, dark sauce that serves as the basis for a true demi-glace, as well as often being used in classic French recipes like Beef Bourguignon. It can be made vegetarian through the simple removal of the lardons or bacon and substituting the beef stock with vegetable.
As always, La Rousse:

Espagnole Sauce: A brown sauce, which is used as a basis for a large number of derivative brown sauces, such as Robert, genevoise, bordelaise, Bercy, Madeira, and Périgueux. It is made with a brown stock to which a brown roux and a mirepoix are added, followed by a tomato purée. Cooking takes several hours and the sauce needs to be skimmed, stirred, and strained.

So, first things first, the Mirepoix:


Mirepoix Ingredients:
1 part celery, diced
2 parts onion, diced
1 part carrot, diced
1/2 part (by volume) streaky bacon or lardons

Method
1. Melt just enough butter in the pan to thinly coat the bottom.
2. Let the onion and carrots sweat briefly, then add celery and lardons.
3. Cover and cook on medium for about 20 minutes.

You will not use much of this mixture for the Espagnole, so set all but about half a cup aside to store in the freezer. Mirepoix, once made, comes in handy in all sorts of stocks and soups!
The next step is to make a brown roux:



Like a blonde roux, the recipe includes using equal parts butter and flour (by weight), melting, and letting the flour toast. However, unlike the blonde, you allow the process to carry on until the mixture has formed a deep, chestnut color. For our Espagnole, we used 25 grams of both butter and flour, which works out to 2 tablespoons butter and 1/4 cup flour.

Mix the roux with 1/2 a cup mirepoix, and then combine with 1 cup chopped mushrooms and a can of chopped tomatoes. Add 1 liter of beef stock, along with thyme, chervil, and parsley, and simmer uncovered for 4 hours.


After cooking, skim the sauce and strain through a cheesecloth to get all the veggies out. Even though they'd had--as my high school bio teacher would say--"the snot and vitamins cooked out of them", I was sad throwing all those good vegetables away. Of course, the sauce was flavorful and completely saturated with the taste of carrots, celery, onion, tomatoes, mushrooms, and bacon (!), we decided to make a stew that could reincorporate them in some way.

First, we browned a pound of cheap beef with simple herbs:

And then stewed it with the sauce, in the oven, covered, for about 4 hours at 250˚ F. Three or so hours in, we added some diced butternut squash and reincorporated the veggies from before, along with about 1/2 a cup of reduced red wine and the juice of half a lemon. This made for the most hearty, deepest-flavored stew I'd ever had, and it tasted delicious on couscous (though I couldn't fault anyone who wanted to cook up some simple dumplings or egg pasta to accompany it instead). I don't have any photos of the stew, though, because all stew is incredibly unphotogenic.

It was wonderful.

Hollandaise --> Eggs Florentine

The poached egg. Slightly less perfect than the oeuf en cocotte, but simpler and healthier. Unless you decide to cover it in Hollandaise sauce, put it on top of some spinach (healthy again, maybe?), and toast. I can honestly say I'm not a good enough home chef to bring all of these ingredients together perfectly without help or incident. Even with Ben doing half the work in the kitchen for me, we almost managed to set off the fire alarm. Stupid toast.

But first, the Hollandaise Sauce. Once again, La Rousse:

Hollandaise. A hot emulsified sauce based on egg yolks and clarified butter. It is the foundation of several other sauces, including chantilly (or mousseline), maltaise, mikado and mustard sauce, depending on the ingredients added. It is served with fish cooked in a court-bouillon, or with boiled or steamed vegetables. The sauce should be made in a well-tinned copper or stainless steel sauté pan; an aluminium pan wil turn it greenish. As it must not get too hot, hollandaise sauce should be kept warm in a bain marie. If it does curdle, it can be re-emulsified by adding a spoonful of water, drop by drop; use hot water if the sauce is cold, cold water if the sauce is hot.

Basically, Hollandaise is an emulsion of butter and lemon using egg as the emulsifier, since lemon (acid) and butter (fat) are mortal enemies in real life. The recipe is finicky enough that it's important to have everything in the mise-en-place ahead of time.

Hollandaise Ingredients
3 egg yolks
1/2 T lemon juice
200 g butter (50 g cold, 150 melted)
salt
white pepper

Method
1. Whisk the egg yolks in a pan (not on the stove!) until they are a lighter yellow. Depending on the color of the yolk to start with (organic eggs may never get to the 'lemon yellow' color our recipe hinted at).
2. Place the pan in a bain-marie and add the lemon juice, whisking continuously. The water should be warm, but not hot. Whisk the eggs until they are the consistency of cream, not thoroughly cooked, but warm.
3. Add the cold butter, take the eggs off the heat, and whisk until incorporated. The mixture should be thickening and pulling away from the pan.
4. Add salt and pepper and more lemon juice if desired, but only by tiny bits at a time.
5. Incorporate the rest of the melted butter bit by bit, whisking, letting the sauce thicken. Keep warm and use immediately.

Eggs Florentine Ingredients
1 piece of toast
1/2 cup of spinach, cooked, with salt and pepper (and garlic powder if desired)
1 poached egg
4 T Hollandaise sauce

Method
If you've gotten this far, you don't need instructions. Just pile it all on and enjoy. :)

Poached Eggs over Spinach with Sauce Velouté (Ravigote)

This might not look the most appetizing in photos, and the 1980s, haute-cuisine-style plating doesn't help, but, trust me, this tasted delicious.

Ravigote sauce has this sort of cryptic and scary entry in La Rousse:

Ravigote. A spicy sauce served hot or cold but always highly seasoned. Cold ravigote is a vinaigrette mixed with capers, chopped herbs, and chopped onion. The hot sauce is made by adding velouté sauce to equal quantities of white wine and wine vinegar, reducing with chopped shallots; it is finished with chopped herbs and served particularly with calf's head and brains and boiled fowl.

Essentially, the cold version is a herbed vinaigrette that lends itself to mussels, veggies,, and salad in general.

We couldn't find a more exact recipe for warm ravigote anywhere, so we used this opportunity to practice a velouté and then go crazy with some leftover spinach and eggs and a package of smoked salmon I accidentally carried with me in my bag all the way to London and back while British-Librarying the whole day.

Velouté Ingredients
75 g butter
75 g flour
1.5 litres chicken stock

Cooking procedure
1. Melt butter with flour in a pan to make a blond roux.
2. Add chicken stock and bring to a boil, cooking for up to 30 minutes.



If I could do it again, I'd halve the white wine vinegar and put in a bit more white wine to compensate for the lost flavor. The sauce ended up very tart, and although I liked it a lot (sauerkraut, pickled beets, and mustard being some of my favorite foods), I don't that many people would.

Ravigote Ingredients
75 ml white wine vinegar
75 ml white wine
5 shallots
2 cloves garlic
1 T Herbs de Provence
pepper

Ravigote Procedure
1. Chop the shallots and garlic and let sweat in some butter for about 5 minutes.
2. Add white wine and vinegar to a stockpot, and simmer to reduce a bit.
3. Combine shallots and garlic to liquid, and add herbs.
4. Reduce to ~50% the original volume, and add to the velouté.
5. Reduce slightly more if desired, and add pepper to taste.

Summer of Sauces - Béchamel

More than halfway through the summer, we're finally tackling the first on our list of the canonical French Sauces, and one of the most straightforward ones, too. Named after the Marquis de Béchameil (1630-1703), the chief steward of Louis XIV, it was originally a velouté with heavy cream, and, in addition to nutmeg, also included bay leaf and onion as flavoring. Now, however, it commonly refers to a white sauce with simple seasoning. We were looking for a challenge, though, and our bechamel became the base of a Gruyere cheese soufflé...

Ingredients
40g (6T) butter
40g (3T) flour
200 mL (2/3 cu) milk
salt
pepper
nutmeg


Procedure
1. Melt the butter in the pan on medium heat.
2. Add flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Stir frequently on low to medium heat to create a blond roux.
3. Add the milk, and heat to a simmer but not to a boil while stirring constantly. The sauce should thicken in 6-8 minutes.