Tackling the ultimate cheese sauce, Emma ponders the complicated cooking methods and the cost of Heston's recipes
As with other recipes of Mr Blumenthal’s I’ve tried - spag bol, chilli con carne, chicken tikka masala, all from the In Search of Perfection series - I’ve found that the predominant problem for home cooks is not actually the techniques, or even the availability of the ingredients, but the cost.
And, once again as I mulled making his ultimate cheese sauce, I was blown away with how much money he assumes the average Joe (even the average foodie Joe) is willing to spend on dinner at home.
The only thing reduced is the wine
Reducing nearly a whole bottle of good quality wine (there’s no point using a cheap bottle – it’ll taste like rancid vinegar by the time it’s reduced sufficiently) to make half a pint of cheese sauce feels like a painful extravagance to me. Even more so given the current economic climate (which I must assume is not affecting Bray).
He gives several variations on the cheese recipe, so I used the version for cauliflower cheese, which was definitely the least complicated of Heston’s recipes that I’ve come across, and not much more faff than making a proper Mornay sauce.
Was it worth it?
To give it a proper test I then used it in lasagne instead of bechamel, but was it worth the expense and the washing up? Pans used for meat reductions tend to need what my husband calls ‘overnight soaking’ – i.e. leave it in the sink until someone else gets sick of the sight of it and scours it herself!
The flavours of the cheese certainly came through bright and true, so much so that I realised how much they are lost in a classic cheese sauce, and the texture was indeed intensely velvety. However I felt it wasn’t a total success - the sauce is seriously intense from the reduced chicken stock, and I imagine if you used shop-bought cubes it could be quite overpowering. This is definitely one for your homemade stock.
When I used the sauce in my standard beef lasagne recipe I also found I missed the calm creaminess of a normal cheese sauce, that dense blanket of bechamel and cheese. The sauce IS delicious though, which begs the question… what would I use it for?
Heston’s suggestion of cauliflower cheese I feel would also suffer from the lack of milk in the sauce, so thus far all I can think of is to use it as fondue… in very small quantities!
Want to join in?
Thank you Emma. If you want to join in and potentially win a tour of Heston's lab!, just register with lovefood, pick a recipe from the show, attempt it properly, and let us know how you got on by sending some pics and a few hundred words by email to contactus@lovefood.com
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