Day 7 - Bechamel and Veloute

Today we made 2 more of the mother sauces; Bechamel and Veloute. If you're keeping score, there are five mother sauces... Bechamel a cream based sauce, Espignole a veal based sauce, Tomato a (believe or not) tomato based sauce, Hollandaise (sauce from hell) with a clarified butter base and Veloute a chicken stock based sauce.

So today we started with the Bechamel and Veloute. With the Bechamel sauce we made a Cream of Tomato Soup.

The chefs said it was okay but Chef Perez asked me to add one more pinch of salt to what I had left in the pan and compare that to what I presented. I will admit after adding the salt I expected the new soup to be more salty but instead it was more tomatoey (if that's a word). I was suprised that by adding the kosher salt, it brought out the natural flavor of the soup instead of making it saltier. I was a pinch of salt away from perfect. Lesson learned.

We then took the Veloute and made Mushroom Soup. I unfortunately didn't get a picture because I was short on time but picture a bowl of thick greyish-brown liquid. It was a little thin for the chefs but they said the flavor was spot on. I just needed to reduce it a little more (let it cook a little longer.)

So seven days down and I'm pretty exhausted. It's a ton of info thrown at us so fast but I'm dedicated to hanging in there. I've been promised it gets easier. We will see.