Now that we’re sheltering at home, I find myself experimenting more in the kitchen. Last night, I fixed pan-seared mahi-mahi and wanted to pep up an essentially bland dish with a sauce. So, I went off to Google to find interesting white sauces for fish.
I found several flavorful-looking sauces. Most I recognized as being based on either a Bechamel or Veloute starter sauce. The thing is, though, that the method for preparing these sauces involves getting at least two and sometimes three pans dirty, plus they can be pretty time-consuming to say nothing of tricky. I’ve had occasional trouble making sauces this way. They really do require practice and paying attention. If you’re doing several things at once, as I’m always doing when cooking dinner, it’s easy to lose track and ruin your sauce. Moreover, I’m a one-pan kind of guy and all in for efficiency, so I went looking for alternatives.
The main reason these are tricky and take multiple pans involves the roux. This is a mixture of equal parts fat–usually butter–and flour. This involves several steps. First, you’re supposed to use clarified butter, so that adds about fifteen minutes. Next, you make the roux itself by whisking flour into the heated butter. I wanted a white sauce, so this only takes four or five minutes. To get the basic sauce, you then add warm liquid–milk for Bechamel and broth for Veloute–to the roux. “Warm” means that it’s been heated in another pan. After about 15 minutes of whisking together the liquid and the roux, you’ve got your basic sauce.
However, most of the sauces I was interested in called for you to sautee shallots, garlic, or other ingredients, add them to your base, and then simmer. That’s another step and another dirty pan. That makes at least three pans. Sheesh.
So, I went looking for alternatives. I found one recipe that used something called a beurre manié instead of a roux. This technique involves fewer pans, less time, and promised fewer places to screw up. But I wondered if it really worked as well. Fortunately, I found this blog, where the author actually experimented with the two techniques, roux and beurre manié, to see if she could discern a difference in the results. She found none. That was good enough for me.
The basic technique is the same, namely using butter and flour as a thickening agent for your sauce. The difference is that with beurre manié you begin with equal parts by weight of room-temperature butter and flour. You then knead together the room-temperature butter and flour to make the beurre manié. Meantime, you can sautee your shallots, garlic, and whatever in your saucepan. If you wish, you can deglaze with white wine and then add your remaining liquid, in my case chicken broth, and apply medium-low heat. Once the broth is warm, whisk in your beurre manié. Continue to whisk so that glops of sauce don’t accumulate on the bottom or corners of your pan while the mixture simmers, perhaps five to ten minutes.
At the end, you can add herbs or other spices of your choice. In my case, I added about a tablespoon of fig jam and a tablespoon of stone-ground mustard. I whisked the liquid for a couple of more minutes and wound up with a marvelous sauce, a perfect complement to our mahi mahi. Further I got only one pan dirty and didn’t have to mess with a roux.
I wanted a white sauce, so that meant I could use either a beurre manié or a blonde roux. There are other kinds of roux, namely brown roux and dark roux, that involve cooking the butter and flour longer until it changes color. For these darker versions, the cooked flour in the roux both thickens the sauce and adds a nutty flavor. Using beurre manié won’t add that flavor, and so the two techniques won’t yield comparable results when you need a darker roux. Julia Child, among others, claimed that beurre manié also results in a “dreadful flour” taste to your sauce, but the above cited experiment was to test for exactly that outcome and failed to find it. If you have lumpy sauce, where some of the flour has not dissolved, you certainly will get a flour taste, but whisking your beurre manié into the simmering liquid should prevent that.
I’ve even used the beurre manié to create a roux. I just added the kneaded flour and butter mix to a medium warm pan containing sauteed shallots and garlic and whisked it until I got the frothy, mix you get with a conventional roux. After that, you can proceed as you would for either Bechamel or Veloute sauce. I’ve not seen this method explicitly mentioned on cooking blogs, but it worked for me. If you want to try this, all you need to do is rearrange the steps below.
This is a cooking entry, so I’ll close with the recipe.
Enjoy!
Mahi Mahi with Garlic Fig Mustard Veloute Sauce
Ingredients
- two filets of mahi mahi
- 2 TBSP olive oil
- 2 TBSP of butter divided
- 2 TBSP of flour
- 1 C chicken broth
- 2 TBSP white wine
- one shallot diced
- two cloves garlic diced
- dash of nutmeg
- 1 TBSP of fig jam
- 1 TBSP of stone ground mustard
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
Method for the Sauce
- Knead together 1 TBSP of room-temperature butter and 2 TBSP of flour
- Melt 1 TBSP of butter in sautee pan under medium heat
- Sautee shallots and garlic in pan for about 3-4 minutes, until soft.
- Add wine to pan and simmer until the liquid mostly evaporates
- Add broth to pan and bring to a simmer
- Add butter/flour mixture to the pan and whisk until fully combined
- Simmer for 5-10 minutes until thickened
- Whisk nutmeg, jam, and mustard into sauce
- Continue to whisk until ingredients are fully combined.
- Add salt and pepper to taste.
Method for the Mahi Mahi
- Bring skillet to medium heat
- Brush mahi mahi filets with olive oil and season with salt and pepper
- Add 2 TBSP olive oil to skillet.
- Once the oil shimmers, add the filets, skin side down, to the pan.
- Cook undisturbed for three minutes.
- Flip, and cook an additional three minutes.
- Place a swirl of sauce on the plate, add the fish, then top with a generous helping of the sauce. Suggested vegetables are roasted baby bok choi or roasted Brussels sprouts. The sauce is good with either choice.
Notes
