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Rub the mixture over the entire surface of the target meat, cover, and refrigerate from 4 hours to 2 days. Cook as desired.

Do not add any more paste once the cooking begins.

Software :

4 cloves of garlic

10 mint leaves

1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon kosher salt

2 teaspoons freshly ground black

pepper

6 tablespoons strong mustard

Target meat

Hardware :

Food processor

CHAPTER 8

Sauces

Once used to smother the taste of spoiled food, now used to enhance natural flavors.

All the World’s a Sauce

By and large, most home cooks don’t do sauce… and that’s too bad. Traditional sauces are indeed scary—as all dinosaurs (even the cute ones) are. They’re scary because they are not of our time. They are of a time when toqued Frenchmen walked the earth, backed by armies of fourteen-year-old apprentices who probably didn’t live to see forty because the air in the kitchens, with their wood-burning ovens, would rot their lungs. The kitchens these culinary T-Rexes occupied bear no resemblance to the rooms we cook in, nor did the groceries that filled them. These guys worked with whole everything: they didn’t buy a steak, they bought a side of beef. They didn’t buy a fish filet, they bought the fish. They purchased cartloads of produce and had that army of apprentices at the ready to clean it all. This meant a lot of leftovers: meat scraps and bones and fish heads, carrot tops, mushroom stems—that sort of thing. Being clever and innovative, the ancient chefs didn’t want to waste these items. They made sauces, and everyone was happy.

Fast-forward a couple hundred years and people are still buying books packed with recipes for the mother sauces and their archaic offspring. This makes about as much sense as going to the barber to have leeches slapped on a wart.30

Still, there are lessons to be learned from les dinosaurs. They made sauces out of leftovers and so should we, as long as the process doesn’t require that you hire a brigade of assistants.

Most classical sauces fall into these extremely overgeneralized categories:

• Sauces based on stocks

• Sauces based on emulsions

• Sauces based on roux

A stock is a liquid in which collagen from animal bones and connective tissue has been dissolved and converted into a protein matrix called gelatin. Broth and stock are not the same thing. A broth is essentially any liquid that’s had food cooked in it, be it meat or vegetables. Bones are not required for a broth, but they are for a stock. Thus, there is no such thing as vegetable stock.

An emulsion is a colloid31: two liquids, which do not like each other, are forced into a colloidal relationship via dispersion of one into the other in the form of microscopic droplets. Vinaigrette dressings are temporary emulsions; unless there is an emulsifier present (such as lecithin or Polysorbate 80, for instance, or pulverized vegetable matter, like mustard) vinaigrettes will always separate in the end. Mayonnaise and hollandaise are also oil-in-water emulsions (mayo is raw, hollandaise cooked), but they are more stable than vinaigrettes because of emulsifiers present in the egg yolks. Butter is an emulsion made up of water droplets in fat.

A roux is an equal mixture of starch (usually from wheat flour) and fat, which are mixed together and cooked. A flavorful liquid is then added and the starch particles, encased in the fat, are free to be distributed in the liquid. With the addition of heat, they swell and burst, thickening the liquid. American gravy (the kind usually served at Thanksgiving), “sawmill” gravy, and most pan gravies are examples of roux sauces.

Stock

I don’t make stock often, but when I do I always feel like I’ve gotten away with something, like I’ve pulled some kind of alchemical con job on nature.

Stocks have always provided a way to juice a little more value out of the ingredients on hand. Veal bones are a pretty terrific source of collagen, but I rarely have a cow carcass lying around