Clarification on mother sauces, hopefully pinned by mods.
Just to start this off there are 3 categories of cooking.
Heat
Pressure
Acid
Now to clear it all up:
- Mayonnaise/aoili IS a mother sauce, as the egg is cooked with acid from either lemon juice or Dijon mustard (both of which being high acid components to cure the egg)
1B. Hollandaise, categorically different from Mayonnaise/aioli due to the inclusion of a liquid part reduction and the necessity of heat
Tomato, no further explanation required.
Espagniol (Sp?) Your basic pan sauce building fond and deglazing, sometimes with the inclusion of flour but always including fat
Veloute: fortified stock plus the inclusion of roux, commonly recognized as "Gravy" truly a staple in American cuisine.
Demiglace. Built purely off of collagen in the stock used for the reduction and the inclusion of reduced wine to mount in sugars to truly create the body of the sauce.
(Honorable mentions): beurre blanc. Can't be made more simply than its base components and widely utilized and extremely versatile in its execution and flavoring based on the chef at hand. You could also include a beurre Roche for the same reasons.
Gastrique/Ridurre: also cannot be made more basic than its core components but is widely utilized and many other sauces branch from this base.
If anyone would like to critique or add please do, I have almost 2 decades of experience with various restaurants and concepts, a culinary degree, and this is my brand of autism. I'd love to let you know how whatever you post fits into one of these categories.
Footer: im tired of seeing new/fledgling/"creatives" try to break Escoffier's life work down to fit their purview. All of what I've listed is facts backed up by tried and true chefs over centuries. This sub needs a control post to cut out the new heads/part timers who think they are able to reinvent the wheel. (Which id say is more established than the wheel itself.)
Scrapping, refining, reposting tomorrow. Thanks to the "chefs" who tried to "help" and thank you very much to the actual chefs who pointed out my gaps. Regardless this sub needs a definitive post of mother sauces and I will put in more effort in the repost.