Okuzeka
Culinary Arts & Cooking vocabulary · Ingredients, Stocks & Sauces

Mother sauce

Meaning in culinary arts & cooking, with examples

/ˈmʌðər sɔːs/nounCommon term

In culinary arts & cooking, mother sauce means: One of the five basic sauces of classic French cooking, as set out by Escoffier: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise and tomato. Many other sauces are made from them.

In Turkish: ana sos, temel sos

How it is used

Taught early in culinary school as the base of sauce work. A sauce made from a mother sauce is a derivative or small sauce, for example Mornay from béchamel or béarnaise from the hollandaise family.

Example sentences

  1. In the first month of school we learned all five mother sauces.

  2. Velouté is a mother sauce made from a white stock and a blond roux.

Common collocations

  • five mother sauces
  • classic mother sauces
  • derivative sauce
  • French mother sauces
  • rouxA mixture of equal amounts of fat, usually butter, and flour cooked together and used to thicken sauces and soups.
  • stockA flavoured liquid made by simmering bones, vegetables and aromatics in water for a long time, used as the base for soups, sauces and braises.
  • emulsionA smooth mixture of two liquids that do not normally mix, such as oil and water or vinegar, held together by whisking and often by egg yolk or mustard.
  • reduceTo boil or simmer a liquid so that some of the water evaporates, making it thicker and its flavour stronger. The result is called a reduction.

More terms: Ingredients, Stocks & Sauces

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: