Hi everyone, welcome to Pot Luck Food Talks.
Today we're going to talk about sauces and the sauce maker, the Saucer.
Yeah, what's the deal?
Why is it like ever since I started cooking this like term Saucer has had this like very
mythical sort of like feel to it.
Why do you think that is?
I have a lot of theories.
Like, well, usually in many places that the Saucer is also the guy that also does it.
And smaller kitchens where you have to merge roles, the Saucer also does fish and meats
and sauces, which is kind of like pretty much the coolest things in the kitchen, no?
Somehow or like the highlights in a menu.
Kind of, yeah.
But also I think it has a lot to do with some chauvinistic macho thing that you're the one
and the grill and the sauces and something like that.
That is also on the hotline because on the opposite side, I think the guard man here,
which is the people who usually takes care of also the dressings and salads and coles
and tereins and all of that.
I think technically it's broader, you see more different techniques.
You also have to do with meats.
You also like do a lot of things, but it's not as sexy as the Saucer.
You know?
Yeah, I don't know.
But I don't know why it is because like I feel the same, but I don't want to feel the
same.
You know what I mean?
Like I don't want to admit that to myself that I just find the Saucer much cooler than
a vegetable because like, you know, you talk about vegetable cooking, you know, there's
especially nowadays, there's just as much like feeling and fine tuning and stuff involved.
You know what I mean?
Look at like Anan Passan or like Michel Bras and stuff like that.
You know, it's like it's not just an afterthought anymore, you know?
But still there's something about even now to this day when I make a sauce and I make
a really good sauce, you know, sauces for me are magical, honestly, you know?
And I even thought that as a kid when I would see my grandma cooking, she would make sauces
and they were like unbelievably delicious.
And I always thought like how it was like this really magical skill to me just making
this liquid with like a certain consistency and the certain like flavor that's just like
amazing.
And the sauce makes I still believe that a sauce really makes a dish.
For sure.
Not always, of course, but like a lot of the times the sauce can make or break it.
Yeah, I think like how could I put it?
Like the piece of meat is a skeleton and then the sauce gives it the whole body and nails
and hair and character and the whole whatever to make it like a whole body, you know?
Yeah, I think it comes from my cultural background also, like being German and like eating like
Christmas dinner.
And then like at the end you've eaten the duck, you've eaten the cabbage and then you
just want to have like one more plate and you just take dumplings and just loads of sauce,
you know?
Yeah, and you just like mop up the sauce and that's like the last thing you eat.
Yeah, or having these jars, you know, this little social jars where you can just put
more sauce and you're way more than you need, you know, like love those men.
If I had a restaurant, I would put those on the table, you know, just like a sauce jar.
Yeah.
But, you know, that being said, making sauce is difficult.
Making good sauce is difficult.
And especially if you don't use any cheap tricks, you know, I think that that's also
part of the reason why the Saucer is one of the most respected because the most respected
roles is because it has to be one of the roles with most experience as opposed to, let's
say, other areas like pastry or even garden manager I mentioned, where you can stick to
precise recipes, for example, to make a dressing.
The Saucer, there are too many variables that you have to have criteria to know what's going
on and also to make adjustments according to your knowledge and also the process of
bringing a sauce to point to get it to the right amount of saltiness and aromas and everything,
like finishing a sauce, you know, saying, okay, now it's done.
Now this can be served.
That requires a lot of experience.
Yeah, true, true.
And there's a lot of like intuition, you know, like often, you know, people that I work with,
they ask me something like, but you know, what's the recipe, you know, and there are
a lot of recipes for a lot of things.
And of course you can have a recipe for a sauce, which to me is just like a broad guideline
though.
Exactly, guidelines, yes.
Yeah, because everything else is just like healing and blah and stuff.
You know, I had somebody ask me the other day as I was reducing down a jus, for people
who don't know what a jus is, it's like a very concentrated meat sauce that's basically
just reduced, made from roasted meat and vegetables if you want, and like some type of spices,
depending how you make it, but mainly it's meat and bones.
And you reduce it so much until it's sticky and tasty and greasy.
And I was tasting it while I was reducing.
And somebody asked me, but like, this is obviously, this obviously needs to reduce for like another
eight hours.
So why are you tasting it?
You know?
Because I want to see how it's developing, you know?
Of course.
I can tell now if it's too sweet, did I add too many vegetables?
Did I add too many carrots and too many onions?
You know?
Then I can counteract that now.
I can add some tomato, you know, I can add some this and that, blah.
Or you know, something like that.
And this practice I've been doing, like I've even started doing this when I was in my apprenticeship
at Margot, for example.
I would taste the broths while they were reducing.
And I got the same question back then.
And I was like, no, I didn't want to see how it's progressing, you know?
I remember seeing that.
I remember seeing a video of Eric Lepert doing exactly that and explaining exactly that.
The moment you start, like while it's still super liquid, because you want to have a reference
the next time you do it, you want to remember that flavor.
I mean, it's not to enjoy it.
It's just to know at what point it is exactly.
As you said, how is it evolving?
And then talking about Eric Lepert, like his chef de cuisine is a guy called Eric Gastel.
This is also like a legendary saucier.
I saw a documentary about him making sauces and he has like this sauce station, you know,
with 30 different sauces.
And can you imagine like doing sauces for Le Bernardin where everything has to be so
on point and so detailed, you know, like a three star restaurant?
I guess that's also the point.
Like it's a big deal.
Like in a high end restaurant, the sauce aspect of the whole thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
Totally.
You have to send me that documentary, by the way.
I need to watch that.
Anything that's to do with this like old school cooking.
I love that stuff.
But yeah, no, absolutely.
But then again, but then on the other side, obviously, there's the sauces and stocks also.
We can't forget about stocks, you know, the base stocks you make, you know, fumée, fond
blanc, you know, brown stock, whatever, vegetable stocks, you know.
Before you go on with that, because I think this is really important.
Could you like describe like a normal routine day of a saucier?
Because it's actually there's a lot of stock cooking in a saucier's routine.
So how it was for me when I was working in a saucier, now the kitchen I work in is so
small that we don't have a saucier.
Everybody just does everything.
But for me would get in and the first thing you do is you start the basis that you need.
So if you need to make bisque, right, and you need to make jus, and you need to make,
I don't know, purit.
So you get all your vegetables ready and first of all, you make your mirepoix, right, your
vegetable base.
And you just like smash that down, get it divided.
You get your pots ready, heating up.
I mean, when I was like on high times in the saucier, you know, we'd have these big copper
pots.
And so you get them like to a certain temperature, not high, because you don't want them boiling
hot, but they need some time to really absorb the heat so that they hold it.
So you get it to like a nice medium temperature.
And then you start all your bases, you start sweating off all your stuff.
Depends what you're doing, obviously, if you're making like a brown, like a sauce or like
a roasty thing, you need to start roasting off your vegetables.
If you make clear stock or like a clear base or something, you know, you get that going,
but you get it going as fast as possible.
And then obviously it depends on sort of like what produce you have coming in, because if
you're the saucier, you know, you need to prepare all the proteinals, the fish, what
fish pots do you have in the seafood?
Do you have lobster claws?
Do you have langoustines?
Do you have this?
Do you have that?
You know, so you have to have a constant rotation of your production, you know, am I getting
a load of fish in today?
Okay, do I need to make fumet?
Fumet is a clear fish stock, right?
So you get that going.
Am I getting chickens in, you know, or like do I need to make a fond blanc, which is a
clear chicken stock for like a base of something else?
And you need to have this constant production rolling.
And then of course, like once that's going, because those things take the longest time
and they work themselves.
Once they got going, they work themselves while you do other things.
So once they kind of start going, you need to like, you go on to cleaning the fish, cleaning
the seafood, cutting the meat, portioning, et cetera.
And then of course you need to tend to your stocks and sources, right?
So like a stock or a source, it needs constant care and attention.
You need to digress it, you know?
So like all the impurities that get caught in the sort of like the protein that coagulates
while cooking rises to the surface.
And you need to take that off.
You need to skim the fat off because the fat adds bitterness and impurities to your stock.
So you need to constantly take care of.
Yeah, because also any little mistake becomes like exponential and three-dimensional.
Like if you burn the vegetables too much at the beginning, you will have that at the end
sauce or all these notes of whatever mistake you do at some point in the roadmap.
Yeah, for sure.
If you roast your, you know, you roast duck bones, right?
Duck bones have a lot of fat, you know, like that carcasses rather.
And you don't strain off the fats well enough or you roast them a little bit too much.
You start your stock.
It doesn't matter what you do.
It's going to be bitter.
It's going to taste horrible.
Yeah.
I hate like, I've seen like these chefs that don't care about these things.
It's like, no, no.
It's like, I don't take the fat out because so I will have more sauce and it's more cost
efficient.
And it's like, okay, you're just being, you're just not understanding at all what you're
doing, you know?
Yeah.
So if you think about the quantity of your sauce rather than the quality of your sauce,
then you've lost already, you know, because it is a very frustrating process to look in
the restaurant, in my, like in my restaurant, you know, I start like, I'll start like a
20 litre pot of broth, right?
So like I make it a little bit, I have to make it time efficient.
So I don't usually, you make a brown stock and then you make another base of bones and
vegetables.
You put a brown stock on top of that and then you reduce that down.
I don't have time or space for that, unfortunately.
So what I do is I make a very nice base of like roasted bones and I've started doing
jus just with bones and onions.
That's it.
No vegetables, no mewpaw, no onions.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
Like you don't need that.
Yeah.
I put them like Tetris like in a pot so that they're as close together as possible.
I make some brulee onions, which is onions just cut in half with the skin on a pan dry
until they're black on the surface.
These ones have to be really burned.
Yeah.
I love those.
Yeah.
It's a little bit counterintuitive if you think it'll taste burned, but it won't if
you do it right.
It's totally fine.
And then I add water just so it covers the bones.
I want it to be as tightly packed as possible.
And then I let it go overnight at like 80 degrees.
I have an induction that I can put on 80 degrees.
So it's just, it's not even simmering.
It's just like lightly moving and it infuses all night.
Then the next day I bring it to a boil.
I bring all the impurities up.
I take them off and then I strain it and I reduce it.
And out of this 20 liter pot of sauce, I'll maybe get one to two liters of sauce, you
know?
Yeah.
If I'm lucky.
And it's very frustrating to have this pot that's as big as my torso to then have a saucepan
that's like, there's nothing in it.
And you taste it and you're like, it can still reduce some more.
And you're like, but if I reduce it some more, it's all going to be gone.
But if you want a nice sauce, that's what you have to do.
What about thickening?
I think that's also like a super important aspect.
The most purest way in most cases is, as you said, just to reduce it until you have the
desired sticky, collagenous texture.
But I mean, that doesn't apply for all sauces.
Like for instance, a wok sauce, perhaps you're going to use cornstarch or some specific sauces
you will use, yuzu starch, or some specific sauces you will thicken them.
If you're just home cooking, you might just blend the cooking juices with the vegetables
to get like a, you know, like a thick cream.
And, oh yeah.
There are like all kinds of ways.
What are your thoughts on that?
Well, I mean, I think the nicest way, the most purest way is to have just carefully
reduce your stock.
But then again, it depends on your understanding of what you're making.
Stock needs to have enough collagen and it needs to have enough, you know, sugar, as
in like roasted Maillard reaction, you know, particles, like brown particles.
Otherwise you reduce it and it won't get thickened.
You know, I'm a big fan of adding, you know, like very collagenous things to stocks.
Like for example, if I make a chicken stock or especially if I make a brown chicken stock,
I put the feet in, you know, something that like people would have frowned upon, but like,
you know, I, you know, taking inspiration also from Asian cooking, you know, I put the
feet in this super nice.
Yeah, you know, I learned from our friend, John Bastericea.
He had like this industrial gelatin that it looked like brown sugar.
This gelatin you don't see like in stores and he would use that as a sauce thickener.
And I mean, your lips would stick to each other like every time you would eat one of
his sauces.
That's very nice.
I think like, I don't have a problem with thickening, you know, but like the purest
or the like highest artist like to make it without thickening.
Of course.
There's a really good trick from amazing chef, Fergus Henderson from St. John.
They have this thing that they use in their kitchen as a basic cooking tool for different
things for sauces, for pie mixes, for everything.
They call it a trotter gear.
So it's made from pig strutters.
And I think they like cook pig strutters down and then sort of like shredded and like whatnot
and blah.
And I've had it in like many forms, for example, like in pie fillings and stuff like a venison
and trotter pie is amazing, but you get the stickiness and this.
And I think sort of like even if like you make a veal stock, for example, if you have
veal feet, like that's very good.
But even if I have like a, I want to make a nice veal jus, I'll buy like one trotter.
I'll have them cut it in half and I roast it until it's really nice, golden brown, a
delicious flavor and just add it in.
And it gives so much stickiness and so much anxiousness, you know, so much body to the
sauce and gives you that really pleasant, like you just described this feeling of your
lip sticking together.
Yeah.
And I think it's also really nice in that nobody does anymore is blood thickening.
Oh yeah.
You know, where you have like a, like a pigeon sauce, one of the most delicious sauces that
I can remember.
Well, I ate here in Berlin at an event where Christian Lose was cooking and my good friend
Norbert Kruger was, was cooking the dish.
It's like one of his classic dishes.
Like it was like a chapel grill pigeon with sauce, like the one and like, like a, like
a flour sugar.
But that sauce was absolutely delicious.
And it was a pigeon jus that's thickened with a blended mixture of the, of the heart and
the liver and blood.
And so it's like very tricky because you want to thicken it and strain it.
You can't cook the blood too much, you know, otherwise it coagulates and it gets nasty.
And then they added like a melange noir, like a mixture of like dark pepper.
And it was so extremely flavorsome and like pleasant and nice and complex.
One of the best sauces I've ever tried.
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