Category: Sauces

Dijon Cream

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Chicken, seafood or even an eye fillet, Dijon Cream is easy and makes it seem like you have made a bit more effort than just, well, an eye fillet.

Ingredients

2 tbsp Dijon Mustard
3 – 4 tbsp thickened cream
Salt and pepper

Method

  • Combine.
  • Enjoy.

Tzatziki

.Reading time 1 minute.

Serves: 4

A bit boring I know, though a good, home-made tzatziki is pretty cool.

Low fat – if you do it with low, or zero fat yoghurt – and tasty with pretty much anything you can throw at it. Meat, crackers, vegetables.

No guilt.

Ingredients

1 Lebanese cucumber, coarsely grated
Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper
200gm low-fat (or fat free) Greek-style yoghurt
2 tbsp finely chopped mint
1 clove garlic, crushed

Method

  1. Put the grated cucumber in a fine-meshed sieve over a bowl and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. Set aside for 20 minutes or more to drain off the excess moisture.
  2. Place the salted cucumber, yoghurt, mint and garlic in a bowl and mix to combine. Season and enjoy for the next few days.

Basic Hollandaise Sauce

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Serves: 4 – 6

I believe that Hollandaise Sauce is one of those staples that Gordon Ramsay demands you cook for him in Kitchen Nightmares (which of course you can’t) before he rubbishes your grubby restaurant and then rebuilds it by simplifying your menu, throwing out all your furniture and putting a sign out front.

So best you know this simple and classic version then, kindly supplied (though not cooked) by my father.

My mother bemoans that she fast-tracks this sauce by using a food processor though I don’t know what she is talking about. I doubt Gordon would either and not before he threw a chair at you.

Get the water-bath going and do it right.

(And have an ice-cube ready if the sauce splits; just whisk it in a voila!)

Ingredients

4 large egg yolks
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp Dijon mustard
170gm (12 tbsp) unsalted butter, melted
Pinch of cayenne
Sea salt

Method

  1. Position a large heatproof bowl over a pot of barely simmering water, making sure the bottom of the bowl doesn’t touch the water.
  2. In the bowl, whisk the yolks, lemon juice, and mustard until well combined.
  3. Gradually whisk in the butter in a thin stream and keep whisking until the sauce is thick enough for the whisk to leave tracks that hold for a couple of seconds, 1 to 2 minutes.
  4. Whisk in the cayenne and season to taste with salt.
  5. Keep the sauce warm in its bowl set over the simmering water, whisking occasionally, until ready to use.

Rick Stein’s Escalopes of Salmon with a Champagne and Chive sauce

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Serves: 4

Got you at Champagne right?

Classic Rick Stein at his best, Nat and I served this at a lunch with our parents and it was a homerun; ditto the meeting of parents.

Apart from the delicacy and taste of this recipe, best is that you can make most of the sauce in advance, giving plenty of opportunity to fend off the continual barrage of humiliating stories being gleefully shot across your bows by parents:

“I remember when Robert wrote off a car…”

“Ha, that’s nothing, I remember when Natalie wrote of a yacht…”

“Tiny compared to when Robert…”

Die.

750gm salmon fillet
2 tbsp sunflower oil
Salt

Champagne and chive sauce

30g unsalted butter
1 French shallot, finely chopped
100ml champagne + 1tbsp
600ml fish stock
½ tsp caster sugar
50ml double cream
2 tsp chopped chives

Method

  1. Cut the salmon fillet into 12 escalopes; slices length ways, around half a centimeter thick. Brush each one with oil, season with a little salt and lay on a slightly oiled tray.
  2. Melt 10gm of the butter in a medium-sized saucepan. Add 1 finely chopped shallot and cook gently without colouring, until soft. Add 100ml of champagne and boil for 2 minutes. Add the fish stock and the sugar and boil rapidly until reduced by three-quarters. Add the double cream, bring back to the boil and then simmer until it has reached a good sauce consistency.
  3. Keep warm (whilst defending your reputation).
  4. Whisk together another 50ml double cream with 1 tbsp champagne and the chives until it forms soft peaks.
  5. When you are ready to serve, pre-heat the grill to high and bring the sauce back to the boil, whisk in 20gm butter, then the whipped cream mixture.
  6. Grill (or pan fry) the salmon for 30 seconds per side until just firm.
  7. Overlap the escalopes in a center of each warmed plate and pour the sauce around. Sprinkle with a few chopped chives and serve immediately while the sauce is still foaming.

Chicken Yakitori Skewers

.Reading time 1 minute.

Serves: 2

This is a great dish with a really unique, Japanese-BBQ style of sauce.

Really easy to prepare served with rice.

Remember to soak the bamboo skewers in water for 15 minutes before threading the meat.

Ingredients

¼ cup sake
¼ cup Japanese soy sauce
2 tbsp mirin (rice wine)
2 tbsp caster sugar
6 chicken thigh fillets, cut into 2cm pieces
Ground white pepper to taste
2 green onions (spring onion), trimmed, cut into 2cm pieces
6 fresh shiitake mushrooms, halved
2 tsp vegetable oil
1 green onion, extra, thinly sliced diagonally

Method

  1. Combine the sake, soy sauce, mirin and sugar in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally for 2-3 minutes or until the sauce thickens slightly. Remove from heat and set aside to cool.
  2. Combine the chicken and half the sauce in a bowl. Season with ground white pepper. Place in the fridge for 30 minutes.
  3. Thread chicken, green onion and mushrooms alternately onto the skewers. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Add the skewers to the pan and cook for 6 minutes or until cooked through.
  4. Transfer to a platter and spring with extra green onion. Serve immediately with the remaining sauce.

Skinny Hummus

.Reading time 1 minute.

Serves: 4 – 6 as a spread

When I first looked up a low(er) calorie hummus, I searched ‘skinny hummus’ and received only results from a company called Black Swan who has trademarked the term. No recipes.

So in calling this hummus skinny hummus, I may be infringing on their trademark. Though any publicity is good publicity for robbydogcooks.com, so I’ll run with the title until such time that they call me.

Anyway as far as hummuses go, this is a really neat recipe. I added a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil (instead of the water as per the recipe), though next time I’ll go with the water; the oil adds to it, though not as much as being able to smugly tell people it has no oil.

Enjoy.

Ingredients

1 x 400gm can chickpeas, rinsed, drained
¼ c fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp tahini
2 tbsp water
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground coriander
1 small garlic clove, crushed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Sweet paprika (to garnish)

Method

  1. Add all the ingredients except the paprika to a food processor. Process until smooth in consistency.
  2. Transfer to a bowl, garnish with sweet paprika and enjoy!

Café Green Salad

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

 Serves: 4 – 6

This is a really sweet little vinaigrette with the addition of the soy.

To the greens I added thinly sliced radishes and snippets of chives, though you could really do anything and it would be amazing.

Served with a steak w/ black olive butter, some sautéed mushrooms with garlic and a smashing mac and cheese. You can imagine the smiles and red wine cheers!

Ingredients

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp Balsamic vinegar
Small splash soy sauce
Salt and pepper
Salad greens

Method

  1. Whisk together the ingredients except the greens to make the vinaigrette. Taste for seasoning.
  2. Dress the greens with the vinaigrette.

Maurice Brun’s Tapenade

.Reading time 1 minute.

Serves: 8 snacking adults

I found this recipe in Patricia Well’s wonderful ‘Bistro Cooking’; French recipes from small family restaurants across France.

I am going to work my way through some of the fabulous sounding seafood recipes in the next few weeks: ‘L’Ami Louis’s scallops with Garlic, Tomatoes, Basil and Thyme’, ‘Chez Geraud’s Giant Shrimp Grilled with Brittany Sea Salt’, ‘Mussels with Tomatoes, Garlic, Olive Oil and Wine’, ‘Roasted Salmon with Olive Oil’ and ‘Arrantzaleak’s Grilled Tuna with Garlic and Sauce Piperade’, a sauce pf tomatoes, onions and chilis. 

My heart is at 130BPM just think about it!

Anyway, this is a fabulous tapenade I made as part of a bigger plate of dips, spreads and breads.

The rum (versus the traditional cognac) adds a faint, sweet flavour and on some oiled and toasted Turkish bread?

There’s your boy.

Ingredients

2 tbsp drained capers
4 anchovy fillets
1 tsp fresh thyme
1 tbsp rum
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 c (250gm) black olives, pitted

Method

  1. Combine the capers, anchovies, thyme, rum and oil in a food processor and process until just blended. Add the olives and pulse on/off about 10 times until the mixture is fairl coarse though well combined.
  2. Transfer to a bowl and serve.

Café de Paris Butter

.Reading time 5 minutes.

OK, I am going to tread very carefully here and after my brief intro, I am going to revert to a piece I found online many years ago by Franz Scheurer on the topic of Café de Paris Butter.

The reason for treading carefully is threefold:

  1. The original recipe was (and is) a secret and cooked only in one French restaurant in Geneva.
  2. It was so good that apparently the Germans during WWII booked the restaurant out night after night.
  3. There are many interpretations though they are just that; nobody really knows and suggesting that this take on Café de Paris Butter is correct would be dangerous.

Though I think, from what I have read, that this particular recipe is close if not it!

And lordy, of all the butters I have made, it is freaking good.

Don’t be inundated by the extent of the ingredients. Roll up your sleeves and do the hard yards. It freezes and you’ll have the best steaks in town for weeks and weeks.

The excerpt I found by Franz Scheurer:

Created by Freddy Dumont in 1941, specifically to go with sirloin steak, and served in the Restaurant Café de Paris in Geneva, this herb/spice butter was an instant success. So much so that it was almost impossible to get into the restaurant for years. The exact recipe is probably still secret today, and only a few restaurants world-wide are reputed to serve the original recipe, amongst them the Parisian ‘Le Relais de l’Entrecôte’ and the ‘L’Entrecôte de Paris’ and the ‘Café de Paris’ in San Francisco. The original Restaurant Café de Paris in Geneva still exists (albeit under new management) and still has the butter on the menu.

You won’t find a recipe for Café de Paris in Escoffier, Larousse or the Sauce Bible. Nor is it listed in the Oxford Companion to Food, Food Essentials A-Z or in the Cook’s Encyclopaedia. I did eventually find it in the German edition of ‘Der Grosse Pellaprat’, printed in Switzerland in 1966. Interestingly, it closely matches the recipe I have from my father, from his time as a chef at the Savoy in London in 1943.

Surfing the internet it becomes obvious that there are a lot of ‘chef’s versions’ out there, some quite close to what you would expect and some really way-out, like a German hotel chef’s version mounting a herb butter based on thyme, tarragon and parsley with sweetened condensed milk!

In Sydney Café de Paris butter is on the menu at quite a few restaurants and one, Bistro Moncur, is certainly very well known for this dish and their version is superb. 

Below my father’s recipe from 1943:

Beurre Café de Paris

Ingredients

1 kg butter
60g tomato ketchup
25g Dijon mustard
25g capers (in brine)
125g brown eschalots
50g fresh curly parsley
50g fresh chives
5g dried marjoram
5g dried dill
5g fresh thyme, leaves only
10 leaves fresh French tarragon
Pinch ground rosemary
1 garlic clove, squashed then chopped very finely
8 anchovy fillets (rinsed)
1 tbs good brandy
1 tbs Madeira
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp sweet paprika
½ tsp curry powder (Keens)
Pinch cayenne
8 white peppercorns
juice 1 lemon
zest of ½ lemon
zest ¼ orange
12gm salt

Method

  1. Mix all ingredients with the exception of butter in a glass bowl and leave to marinate for 24 hours in a warm part of the kitchen (a slight
    fermentation occurs).
  2. Purée the mixture in a blender and push through a chinois (a sieve to save you looking it up!).
  3. Foam the butter and mix with the purée. Cover and store in the fridge.
  4. It is customary to form the butter into a log, freeze it and cut off slices as you need them.

Keeps for several weeks.

Upon service a round of frozen butter is placed on the cooked sirloin and put under a VERY hot salamander for just long enough to begin to brown the top of the butter (while the butter underneath stays cold).

Ummmm

Cook your steak, let it sit, slice some of the butter on top and put it under the grill until it starts to melt.

Serve with thinly sliced and baked potatoes and an avocado and watercress salad and Vive la Revolution!

Bearnaise Sauce

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Serves: 8

There are a million Bearnaise Sauce recipes online and so here is the one millionth and first; oh, and it is Neil Perry’s.

Of course, the heart of Bearnaise Sauce is consistent across all its recipes so don’t get too excited. This Bearnaise will taste as good as any other classically cooked Bearnaise.

This said, I have had better, though I think that has been more about technique than anything. There used to be a restaurant in Crows Nest called La Grillade that my father took us to when we were kids and just how they got their Bearnaise to be so fluffy, I can only imagine.

But I’m not La Grillade and I don’t make Bearnaise for a living so this is Neil Perry’s version and I commend it to you.

Last time I served this was with a 240-day aged Angus fillet, potato gratin and beans with burnt butter and toasted almonds. You can imagine the effect.

Enjoy.

Ingredients

250g unsalted butter, cut into cubes – bring to room temperature
2 eschalots, sliced
2 tarragon sprigs, 2 tablespoons chopped tarragon leaves
5 whole peppercorns
1/2 cup (125ml) white wine
1/2 cup tarragon vinegar (I substitute white wine vinegar)
3 egg yolks

Method

  1. Heat a saucepan over medium-high heat, add eschalots, tarragon sprigs, peppercorns, white wine and tarragon vinegar and reduce until 1/3 cup (80ml) remains.
  2. Put three egg yolks in a bowl that will sit comfortably over a saucepan. Strain the tarragon reduction and pour over the egg yolks, whisking to incorporate.
  3. Put the bowl over the saucepan of barely simmering water and start whisking.
  4. As it approaches the point at which it is fully cooked, the mixture will thicken by doubling or tripling in size.
  5. Once the sauce is thick, start adding three to four cubes of butter at a time, whisking to incorporate.
  6. When all the butter is incorporated, remove the bowl from the heat, add 2 tablespoons freshly chopped tarragon and check the seasoning.