Make Perfect French Sauces

The five mother sauces of French cooking — béchamel, velouté, hollandaise, béarnaise, and demi-glace — aren't an arbitrary historical list. They're the foundational emulsions and reductions from which most European sauces descend. Learning all five in a single session is ambitious and entirely achievable if you understand the underlying logic: each sauce is a fat emulsified with liquid, thickened to a specific consistency, and flavored for its context.

The session moves through each sauce in order of technique complexity. Béchamel (butter, flour, milk) and velouté (butter, flour, stock) teach the roux and the relationship between starch and liquid. Hollandaise and béarnaise introduce emulsification with egg yolk — the technique that allows fat and water to coexist as a stable sauce. Demi-glace requires patience and a reduction that concentrates flavor over time. Tasting as you go is the skill this session builds most.

The recovery technique for broken hollandaise and béarnaise is worth memorizing before you start: whisk a fresh egg yolk in a clean bowl and add the broken sauce drop by drop while whisking. The fresh yolk provides new emulsifying capacity. Knowing this recovery exists makes the whole sauce less intimidating — the stakes of a potential break are manageable rather than catastrophic.