Veloute

Ingredients

• 4 tbsp unsalted butter

• 4 tbsp all-purpose flour

• 3 cups low-sodium chicken broth

Method

In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. While stirring, slowly add the flour to the butter. Keep stirring to ensure the butter fully incorporates and doesn’t form lumps. Keep adding the flour until the mixture creates a loose paste.

Slowly pour the chicken stock into the saucepan with the roux, whisking continuously. Once added, the chicken stock should not have any lumps of roux in it. Bring the mixture to a simmer and let it reduce, frequently stirring, for 20-30 minutes. You can tell it’s done once the sauce coats the back of a spoon and is glossy and velvety in appearance.

Pour the sauce through a fine-mesh sieve (or cheesecloth) into a bowl. The sauce will keep well in the refrigerator for up to three days, or you can freeze it for up to three months.

Recipe by Girl Gone Gourmet

About the Sauce

A light cream sauce, veloute is perfect to drizzle over a Chicken Wellington or a Grilled Salmon with Dijon. It’s the stuff of foodie dreams and is not that hard to make, traditionally with chicken stock but also doable with fish, veal or vegetable stock thickened with a blond roux of butter and flour.

When you’re making a veloute, you can tell when it’s done once the sauce coats the back of the spoon and appears ‘velvety’ to you. Derivatives of the veloute include the albufera sauce, with the addition of meat glaze and the allemande sauce, made by adding a few drops of lemon juice to egg yolks and cream.

Seafood tastes delicious with a veloute, especially a white wine sauce like the bercy, flavoured with fish stock, shallots and parsley. As well as the Normandy, conjured by flavouring a fish velouté with chopped mushrooms and thickening it with a mixture of egg yolks and heavy cream. This liaison makes a veloute one of the most favoured sauces till date.

Try this poached salmon swimming in a luscious veloute, ah, sinful!