Suprême sauce
Pan roasted chicken breasts, garlic mashed potatoes, fiddlehead ferns and suprême sauce
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| Type | Sauce |
|---|---|
| Place of origin | France |
| Main ingredients | Velouté sauce, cream or crème fraîche |
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Suprême sauce is one of the classic "small sauces" of French cuisine, that is, one made by combining a basic or mother sauce with extra ingredients.
Traditionally, this sauce is made from a velouté sauce (a roux sauce made with a meat stock - in the case of suprême, a chicken stock is usually preferred), reduced with heavy cream or crème fraîche, and then strained through a fine sieve. This is the recipe as used in Larousse Gastronomique, a seminal work of French haute cuisine, first published in 1938.
A light squeeze of lemon juice is commonly added. In many cases, chefs also choose to add finely chopped and lightly sautéed mushrooms to the dish, although this was not specifically mentioned in Larousse Gastronomique or by Auguste Escoffier, the "Emperor of the World's Kitchens", who was an arbiter of classic French cuisine.
It is possible to make a similar sauce to pass for sauce suprême by taking béchamel sauce (a classic white mother sauce made with butter, flour and milk), with a poultry (effectively a shortcut to making a velouté by combining the roux and stock elements) and butter.
Mrs Waters' The Cook's Decameron suggests the following recipe: the sauce is made by placing three-quarters of a pint of white sauce into a saucepan, and when it is nearly boiling, adding half a cup of concentrated fowl stock. It should then be reduced until the sauce is quite thick, passed through a chinois strainer into a bain-marie and have added two tablespoons of cream.
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Wikipedia