Food Lab: Velouté

We're back!

Your intrepid Food Labbers have still been cooking, of course, both together and individually - gotta eat! - we just haven't been doing much labbing lately.

We have, however, been planning our three-years-delayed (Thanks a lot, coronavirus!) Ten (now 13) Years of Food Lab trip to....France! No, we're not there yet, but we're headed there this fall. It will be a third return for Chef Spouse and me, but Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee have never been, so we're looking forward to sharing some of our favorite sights in Paris with them and then heading to a lovely villa in Provence for a week of farmers markets, bakeries, vineyards, cooking, eating, and drinking together with some additional friends. 

Our pending trip to France and Chef Spouse's shiny new account with ProFish (acquired in support of the Summer of Poke, which is a story for another time) did inspire our most recent Lab though: velouté.

Velouté, for those who don't know, is one of Escoffier's "mother" sauces and is a simple combination of a blond roux and a light stock, generally chicken or fish, that is then served over poached chicken or fish (or as a base for a sauce for veg or pasta).

The ratio we were using was 1 Tbsp each flour and butter to 1 cup of stock, finish with salt and WHITE pepper to taste (no black pepper spots in your pristine velouté, s'il vous plaît!)

We set our plan over oysters and bubbly: 

Test one would be: Should you start with fish stock or with water, wine and aromatics?

Test two would be: If you wish to enhance your velouté, should you use cream or an egg yolk?

Chef Spouse had procured snapper for the poaching that would give us the stock in the first place and branzino filets for the actual poached fish over which to serve the finished sauce. We also had some adorable little cabbages from our CSA that we poached and then seared on the Green Egg (which was at the ready because Mad Kitchen Scientist was also smoking some salmon, aka "Bacon of the Sea") because we figured, correctly, that we were going to have more velouté as a result of our tests than needed to sauce branzino filets for four. (That Bacon of the Sea got turned into snackies for hungry cooks spread on individual endive leaves with cream cheese enhanced with The Executive Committee's fresh-snipped chives.)

That is some good-looking fish.

Seriously, that is some GOOD-LOOKING fish.

Fortunately, Mad Kitchen Scientist had fish stock already waiting, so we pulled together a pot with water, white wine, fennel, carrot, celery, green onion, and thyme, cut the snapper in two, and poached.

The water/wine/aromatics combo was the CLEAR winner, both as a base for the sauce and as a cooking liquid for the snapper. Starting with a fish stock and then adding MORE fish, even as mild a fish as snapper, was...too fishy. (Although we did eat ALL the snapper regardless.) 

So that was easy, and we had our sauce for our poached branzino at the ready.

But what about an enhancement? To cut to the chase: Save the cream for something else, use an egg yolk, and, per Food Lab tradition, make cocktails (or something else) with the white. Even after reducing the sauce, the cream still left it thin and didn't add much by way of richness or mouthfeel. The egg yolk, on the other hand, turned what is a mildly flavored sauce into something with the richness to stand up to our wee cabbages. 

Did you notice I said "cocktails or something else" with the egg white? Turns out, The Executive Committee had gotten a soufflé mould for her birthday that had, as yet, not been christened. She decided she would very much like a late birthday / early July 4th soufflé for dessert, so while the boys were playing with the fish, I followed Julia's recipe for orange soufflé from Mastering. 

A few notes:

• Definitely bother with the "rub two sugar cubes over the surface of the orange before zesting" thing - it sounds silly, but it adds depth.
• If you don't have Grand Marnier handy, Cointreau makes a perfectly acceptable substitute (I wouldn't do a regular triple sec though - I suspect the sugar content is too low).
• You can prep the entire thing up to the point of whipping the egg whites and incorporating them! This is clearly how restaurants manage soufflé for service with only a LITTLE extra time required to prepare it, rather than diners having to sit there for an extra hour to wait for their dessert.
• It's better to slightly *under* do the folding in of the whipped whites than to overdo.

How did it turn out?

Also, the kitchen smelled DIVINE, and I can report that there was not a CRUMB left over.

Yes, I *will* be making more of these when we're in France this fall. Although since we'll be eight, I will probably need to make TWO at a time.