These 5 Sauces Will Upgrade Your Weeknight Meal Game | Epicurious 101

I'm Frank Provo professional chef and color 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 for a 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 bearnaise 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 it 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 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 kind of 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 crocodan 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 and if you have any lumpiness and it's not super smooth you can strain it through a fine mess sieve but for our purposes today I'm putting 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 that 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 foreign so

we're going to make my tomato sauce all these ingredients are fairly simple and it's going to create a nice full bodied and Rich tomato sauce My Pan is preheated I'm going to add olive oil and then I'm going to add my pancetta pork and tomatoes is a match made in heaven and I'm just going to let this stir until it starts to get lightly brown and the fats on the pancetta is going to flavor our oil and flavor our sauce so our pancetta's starting to get light brown I'm going to add my onions at this

point I have garlic as well but I don't want to 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 going to cook for about five or six not that much we just want to lay those base flavors down and have them 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 going to 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 add sweetness the long cooking time add sweetness black pepper lots of it and 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 going to allow for a little

evaporation but not too quickly and we're good to go the sauce is going to reduce the flavors are going to concentrate and that's what's going to give us that nice robust finished product my sauce has been on a low simmer for about two hours oh look at that you you can see that we've got some reduction there look at 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 [Music] 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 at 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 the room 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 going to Brown my bones and then I'm going to 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 want to taste chicken we want to 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 burn we want it to be nice and brown so you want to continue to stir until we get some nice flavor everything in the

pot is getting to know each other I'm going to add my tomato paste at this point it's going to give our sauce a little body it's going to add a little bit of sweetness to our sauce but most importantly it's going to 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 well let it simmer away happily getting some flavor for about 30 minutes and then

we'll move on to the next step of building this 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 room 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 rule looks good kind of peanut buttery it smells nice and nutty it's going to go right into our stock you can see that it's starting to get some texture from that room and I love that right leave it alone now let it simmer away happily we're going to move over here and make a sachet

thyme some parsley stems a bay leaf and some peppercorns whatever 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 thyme so we're going to 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 going to be so good first thing I'm going to do is take out this sachet and then you can just discard and now we're going to 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 clean clear it's thick it's got some beautiful brown roasty color to

it get 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 motor and pestle which is super traditional or a blender if you want motor and pest 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 pecorino a couple of cloves of garlic walnuts are in there

now traditionally we are going to use a pine nut for this Wellness 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 Sir 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 I 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 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 I'm gonna 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 going to 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 going to 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