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Homemade is Better—Supreme Sauce

Homemade is Better—Supreme Sauce

It’s been a few editions since I said I was going to make a velouté.  So here it is!  I’ve written before about the mother sauces of French cuisine, and we’ve made most of them.  The only one left after this article is espagnole or brown sauce.  Velouté is made from the stock of bones that have not been roasted.  Where brown sauce is typically made from beef stock, you need to roast the bones first, with velouté you do not.

The velouté is a really versatile sauce that lends itself well to other types of stock as well.  You can use fish bones, lobster shells, turkey bones, pork bones, duck, or chicken.  The key is to simmer the bones for a few hours to extract the flavour.  So, in today’s recipe, I will also add how to make chicken stock.  This process is interchangeable with other kinds of bones as I’ve already pointed out.

The next recipe I have added is for supreme sauce.  Which is a velouté with the addition of heavy cream and extra butter.  I used it with my upcoming risotto recipe and with sous vide chicken breasts.  I then seared the breasts to get a nice outside color and sliced them.  We roasted some carrots and voila a meal fit for Royalty!

Supreme Sauce

Chicken Stock Ingredients:

2 chicken carcases
2 carrots chopped
1 large onion chopped
2 stalks of celery chopped
2 bay leaves
1 tsp dried thyme
8-9 black peppercorns
1 tbsp parsley

Directions:
  1. Grab your largest pot, add the chicken carcasses, and then fill it with water until the chicken is covered by 1 inch of water.
  2. Add everything else and bring it to a boil
  3. Reduce to a simmer and let it sit for 6 to 8 hours.
  4. Once it’s done simmering, remove the bones, veg and herbs.
  5. Strain the stock with a sieve and some cheesecloth (if you have it, a coffee filter works in a pinch as well, but takes longer to strain).
  6. Let it cool for 12 hours in the fridge so the fat and liquid separate. Scrape off the fat, and you’re left with pure stock.

The stock before and after cooking and straining

Supreme Sauce Ingredients:

1 oz fat (by weight, it could be the fat from the chicken stock, oil or butter)
1oz all purpose flour (by weight)
500ml of chicken stock
125ml heavy cream
15g butter
Salt
White pepper
1/8 tsp lemon juice

Directions:
  1. Melt the fat in a pot and add the flour. Stir until it forms a paste but is not runny.  This is your roux.
  2. Add the chicken stock and whisk to combine until all the roux is incorporated. This is the velouté.
  3. Add the cream and butter and whisk until all the cream is absorbed.
  4. Season with salt and white pepper to taste. You’ll need a tiny amount of white pepper.
  5. Add some lemon juice to bring out a little acid.
  6. Serve with your chicken.

veloute (left) meets heavy cream, butter and seasonings to make supreme sauce (right)

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