Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! My sauce is ruined, the whole dinner is ruined!

I followed this recipe step-by-step. The guy said if I did this way, then I did this, then I did this, then I did that, it would come out just like that picture in the book. I can’t believe that my dinner is ruined. I was supposed to do this really nice gravy and it was supposed to be really nice and thick, so that it would stick every thing and it’s thin, it just looks like chicken soup and I did everything they said. Why did I depend on the recipe again?

Well, welcome back to Cooking Course. If you turned in for fine fancy cooking, you turned into a wrong place, this cooking course and we have a problem here that whines up in a lot of people’s kitchens that you follow these recipes and it doesn’t turn out like the nice picture was and very often, I’m not even sure that they follow the recipe to make that picture anyway. But what I have here is some kind of dish that I’ve been making. It doesn’t really matter what it is but it’s not thick, it didn’t thicken my gravy and this week, we’ve been talking about thickening agents. Starches in particular, roux, fat and starch that makes roux thickens liquids at 150 degrees, starch is gelatinize, they swell liquids and they absorb liquids and swell and this is what thickens our sauces.

So that we talked about in the past that we always have to have a hot liquid and a cold roux or a hot roux and a cold liquid, these two must opposite. So my problem that I’ve got in the stove here is that I’ve got a very thin liquid. I’ve got a very thin sauce here that really is not going to stick to anything. How do I go ahead and thicken this without taking out another pan, melting some butter in the pan, adding some flour to it, cooking out the proteins and so on. It’s an emergency! My guests are coming any minute now, what do I do in an emergency?

Well, I’ve already told you that fat and starch is roux namely butter and flour so what do I got in here? I got a pat of butter, what do I have here? A scoop of flour, let’s add the two of them together and what I’ll do is knead the softened pat of butter and squeeze and much flour as I possibly can into the pat of butter.

What am I doing? Fat and starch roux right? This is an uncooked roux. So as I continue to squeeze as much flour into this butter ball as possible, I’m making and uncooked roux now granted, an uncooked roux is going to taste a little bit more pasty than a cooked roux because we cooked the proteins out but once I get this little ball of fat and starch, fat and flour, butter and flour together, this is my uncooked roux. Oh! I might save the day. So we go back to my boiling liquid here and now that I have my roux and my trusty whisk, I can start crumbling in some of these Beurre Manie it’s called in French, Beurre Manie our uncooked roux and thicken my dish and finish this up.

So what I’ll do actually start crumbling this in here. Come on I will show you how it goes. I had brought you all the way to over to the stove so we can look down into this pan. Hi! Everybody! Into this pan here and look how thin this is. We’re going to pretend this is some kind of dish. Pretend there is chicken in here and vegetables and all kinds of stuff but this is just an example. Look how thin this gravy is, it doesn’t stick to the back of the spoon at all. But when I introduce my Beurre Manie and I start to crumble some of that into the boiling liquid, this is my liquid and cold roux. It’s an uncooked roux like I said, I may have a little starchy taste to it but we are in an emergency situation here. The guests are coming. We need to get this completed as quickly as possible. So with my Beurre Manie in there and I continue to whisk and break that up, what this does in enable the starches to gelatinize the fat in there put lines up the starch molecules so that I don’t get lumps and the starch is gelatins and thicken this liquid. So I could make a roux in a separate pan and add this to a liquid. Of course, I would have to chill it down first but now, I’ve got my nice thickened liquid and if I take my spoon and run it through here, look how much better this sticks to the spoon and I’ve got ,my Nape.

This is a much thicker sauce now with a nice chicken and butter flavor. Running my hand through there gives me the Nape.

So that’s our study of Beurre Manie, how we can thicken items in an emergency. So that is our thickened dish. Whatever it might have been in here, my object is not to teach you recipes like I have said a hundred times but to teach you some kind of procedure. So what can you make up from this? Well, bring a little bit of chicken broth to a boil on the stove and add some cubes chicken and some carrots and some celery and some onions and some broccoli and anything that you would like and use this method of Beurre Manie push as much flour into a soften pat of butter as possible and then crumble it in there when it comes to a simmer and stir it, it will thicken your gravy.

You know what this is like? This is like chicken and dumplings. In the south, people take chicken broth simmering, they put the chicken in there and they drop those dumplings in. Well, those dumplings are so starch laden that the whole thing turns into a nice gravy, a thick gravy that sticks to everything.

If you wanted to do this again, what if you wanted to make Mexican dish, well, we can bring some kind of liquid to a simmer if we wanted to, chicken broth like that and then maybe add some jalapeño’s or some onions, some cumin and coriander, some pieces of beef, or shrimp or chicken or steak, whatever it may be and then use this little Beurre Manie trick that I just showed you, it is the combination of fat and starch roux that thickens our sauces. Man, it’s one of the greatest things you can do because a good sauce makes up for a bad piece meat.