“I love beurre blancs I love the flavors I love the richness. We don’t want to make the menu look like the back of a soup can.” “We use it all the time, but we don’t necessarily advertise it as such. “It’s not cutting edge anymore,” says Campanile’s Mark Peel. Yet we rarely hear of it - maybe because it doesn’t have the cachet of a jus or a coulis. Since then, it’s become part of the standard repertoire, a staple in many a restaurant kitchen.

It’s an old sauce, but it came into its own during the heyday of nouvelle cuisine 30 years ago, when chefs began favoring it over the heavier roux-based sauces of the old French kitchens. Subtle in flavor and ethereal in texture, it’s a warm lemon-colored sauce, lightly aromatic, with a faint hint of brine lacing the creamy butteriness. Take the classic beurre blanc sauce: a velvety, delicate butter sauce that originated in Nantes, France, on the Loire River, and was traditionally paired with poached fish.

Unlisted on menus, taken for granted alongside bigger-name items (pan-seared duck! roasted wild salmon!), they’re often relegated to the decorative side of a dish or tucked under the marquee ingredients.īut from such marginalized outposts, what beauty can be discovered what subtle flavors can be discerned. Though the position of maker-of-sauces has been, since Escoffier, near the top of the kitchen brigade hierarchy, often the sauces themselves go unsung.

Beurre blanc