Let's Talk Sauce

 Veloute made vegan

Aside from stock and butter, it shouldn't be as difficult to translate sauces. If you went to culinary school you learned the classical French mother sauces, and some minor sauces as well. I'm going to show you how to make a dairy-free roux, and then a veloute sauce using the stock from yesterday. 

Roux, it's not as common to use this culinary napalm anymore. You'll more commonly see reductions to make a sauce. But I grew up with roux in sauce, and I have no plans to conform. You just need butter, right? Nope! This is vegan, remember? You can use Earth Balance if you want to avoid dairy and get the visual cues of butter, but it's far easier to simply use oil.

 Equal parts fat and flour in the pan and cook until your desired state of done. It's easy to overcook roux, but it's criminal to under cook it! So keep it on the heat until it gets nutty!

With our roux cooled down and solid, we can measure out how much we will need based on how much stock we're going to use. You need about 1 T of roux per cup of stock. Bring stock to a simmer, whisk in our roux, and simmer for 20 minutes or so to cook out any raw flavors of raw flour. You're looking for a consistency of a thin creamy soup, if you're not there you can add a little more roux, or just simmer to reduce.

Now we have the building blocks for tomorrow's exercise in actually cooking a meal! Southern-style dumplings, by far one of my favorite meals, and we're gonna make it vegan!