Home Cookin'

Last week, we spent a couple of days learning about sauces. First, the chefs demoed how to make stock - a fundamental building block of many made-from-scratch sauces. A great stock is a really unappetizing-looking pot of simmering bones, mirepoix (chopped carrots, celery, and onions), and spices or flavorings. Many sauces are simply made from stock thickened with roux, plus other flavorings. So, next we learned how to make roux (Zack was very excited to hear this--people from New Orleans truly appreciate a good roux). It's a mixture of equal parts clarified butter and flour.

With those two building blocks behind us, Chef M. and Chef L. showed us how to make the mother sauces, of which there are five: bechamel, veloute, brown sauce or espagnole, tomato, and hollandaise. We learned that tomato sauce can be made with or without stock and with or without roux. Since roux isn't exactly low-cal, many cooks thicken soups and sauces without it these days, using a cornstarch slurry or even pureed vegetables instead. At home last night, I decided to use my culinary school skills and make a simple tomato sauce from scratch--sans roux and sans stock, since I didn't really have any beef bones lying around.

I followed Chef M.'s advice and used canned tomatoes--he stressed that canned tomatoes are MUCH better than out-of-season fresh tomatoes, and the sweet ones from summer are already gone. I decided to make a turkey meat sauce with ground turkey and some Italian turkey sausage. My first step, of course, was preparing my mise en place. I chopped an onion cisle (a small onion dice, one of our knife cuts!), minced several cloves of garlic, chopped some fresh thyme, and um, opened a big can of crushed tomatoes. I then cooked my ground turkey and browned a few sausages, setting them aside while I started the sauce.

I first cooked down the onions and garlic in a little bit of olive oil, then added the crushed tomatoes, some tomato puree, ground turkey, and white wine to round out the flavor. I let that simmer for a few minutes and sliced the turkey sausage, then added it to the sauce with the fresh thyme and some red pepper flakes. After letting it simmer and come together (about 20 minutes), I seasoned it with sea salt and black pepper. Chef M. told us that iodized table salt is only good for salting your driveway when it snows, so I've switched pretty much completely over to sea salt.

After boiling some water for pasta, dinner was done. So easy! And so much tastier than opening up a jar of pre-made sauce (even the good stuff like Rao's) and adding some ground meat. I think our dinner guests liked it too. Here they are enjoying hummus and veggies before dinner:



Today we learned how to tress and fabricate a chicken. I think my next home cooking challenge will be to buy a whole raw chicken and cut it up into 8 pieces myself. Then I'll marinate the pieces and grill or saute them. I normally head for the boneless skinless breasts, but I'm feeling adventurous. Stay tuned.