Experimenting with Basic White Sauce
15 October 2007
Last Christmas Simon made me a beautiful present: a cookery course with the Munich celebrity chef Schuhbeck, which we attended at some point last summer. The topic was actually game and poultry, but the lesson also offered a lot of basic recipes for sauces which are perfect company for other dishes, too. So among others the instructor prepared a sauce based on onions, pepper, laurel and some other herbs and spices cooked in a mixture of apple juice and white wine and pressed through a sieve when soft. This is certainly a rather elaborate way of cooking a sauce, but well worth the effort! The sauce - in that cooking session served with guinea fowl - was very fine both in texture and in taste and insprired me to experiment with different herbs and flavours using the same technique. The first result is this very tasty lime and sage sauce, which I combined with veal medaillons. More varieties to come!
Veal Medaillons in Lime and Sage Sauce
| serves 4 as a main dish |
| 600g of veal medallions (1 or 2 per person, depending on size) |
| juice of 4 limes |
| zest of 1 lemon |
| 2 cloves of garlic |
| 15 leaves of fresh sage |
| 250ml white wine |
| 300-400ml vegetable stock |
| 3 tablespoons of whole black peppercorns |
| 3 tablespoons of crème fraîche |
| 2 teaspoons of icing sugar |
| 2 teaspoons of starch |
| 2 teaspoons of butter |
| some olive oil for cooking |
| rice and carrots as side dishes |
Dice the onions and sweat them in little olive oil. Before they get brown cover them with the lime juice and add the lemon zest (just cut off the lemon with a peeler in large pieces), the garlic (each clove just sliced into 4-6 pieces), the very coarsely ground peppercorns (I used a mortar instead of a mill to grind them) and about 10 leaves of fresh sage. Let it simmer slowly until the liquid has almost completely boiled down; then add the white wine and let it reduce again. In total the mixture can easily cook for 30 minutes. Once the onions are completely soft, press them through a fine-mesh sieve. Put the emerging pulp aside and dispose of all the hard bits remaining in the sieve.
In a pot or pan slowly heat the icing sugar until caramelized, then immediately add a dash of white wine and stir well. Add about half of the vegetable stock as well as the crème fraîche and pour in the onion pulp. Let it cook for just a little bit longer and season to taste with the remaining vegetable stock. Dissolve the starch in some water or some of the soup, add it and stir well until the liquid gets more solid and sauce-like. The sauce becomes particularly creamy and even more tasty if you finally stir in just a little bit of butter. You can also add some more leaves of sage for some additional flavor and decoration.
For the veal, heat a non-stick frying pan with a little oil and sear the medallions for about 2 minutes on either side until brown. Season with salt and pepper and place them in the sauce (or pour the sauce over the meat). Let the veal simmer in the sauce for another 5 minutes; the medallions should then (hopefully) be just slightly pink inside. This timing worked out fine for my medallions which were approximately 1.5cm thick and weighed about 100g each; depending on the size you may want to cook them for longer or shorter.
I garnished this very tasty dish with some rice and some carrots which I had just sautéed in butter for about 10 minutes.
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