Recipes

Everything I have written down, in one place. Five categories, forty-two recipes, all of them things I have cooked in professional kitchens long enough to know where they go wrong.

They are grouped the way a kitchen actually thinks about them rather than alphabetically. If you learn the mother sauces you have the foundation for most of the sauces below them. If you learn the 3:1 oil-to-acid ratio in the dressings, you already understand most of the marinades. The categories are not filing cabinets, they are a sequence.

If you are starting from nothing, start with the mother sauces. Everything else on this page is downstream of them.

The Five Mother Sauces

The foundation of classical French cooking and the reason the rest of the sauce world makes sense. Learn these six and you can build a few hundred others from them without another recipe. Start with the overview.

Soups and Chowders

Stock, patience, and knowing when to stop. Most soup failures are seasoning failures, and most chowder failures happen in the last five minutes. See all soups and chowders.

Sauces and Condiments

The working sauces, the ones that go on the plate rather than into the next dish. Some are five minutes and a bowl, one of them takes a month of fermentation. See all sauces and condiments.

Salad Dressings

None of these take more than a few minutes and a jar with a lid. Homemade dressing is not harder than store-bought, it is just a step people skip out of habit. See all salad dressings.

Marinades

A marinade is a decision you make hours before dinner, and marinating longer is not marinating better. Each of these tells you the time limit and what happens if you ignore it. See all marinades, with the how-long-to-marinate chart.

Where to Start

If you are not sure which of these to cook first, pick by what you want to learn rather than by what you want to eat tonight.

To learn emulsification: Mayonnaise, then Hollandaise, then Beurre Blanc. Same principle, rising difficulty.
To learn a roux: Béchamel first, then Velouté, then Espagnole as the roux goes darker.
To learn balance: Italian Dressing and Italian Herb Marinade are the same 3:1 ratio doing two different jobs.
To learn patience: French Onion Soup, where the entire dish is in how long you are willing to stand over the onions.

Before the Recipe

A lot of what happens in these recipes is decided before you start cooking, at the point where you choose and break down the protein. The Butchery Guides cover beef, pork, lamb, venison, elk, bison, poultry, game birds, and the full range of fish and shellfish, from filleting a whole salmon to shucking scallops.

Who Is Writing This

I am Chef Alan. I have spent 35 years in professional kitchens, I have formal culinary education in New Hampshire, and I have been honored as a 6-Time 4-Diamond Chef. More about me here.

If a recipe is missing something you needed, or a step did not make sense, tell me. Get in touch and I will fix it.

Cook Bolder, Serve Wiser, Eat Better.