Our “modern” bouchée à la reine recipe
So you want to make the famed pastry but aren’t too keen on rooster combs and the odd bit of brains? Well, you’re in luck. These days “La bouchée à la reine” (The Queen’s Bite) is a lot less heavy on the “bits”. Also, it’s a great way to start learning about French mother sauces.
This is what you can look forward to
What you will need
Ingredients (4pers):
For our stock (there should be at least one of each vegetable but feel free to up the quantity if you feel like it, it’s very much to taste)
1 chicken
Leek
Onion
Carrots
Garlic
Celery
Peppercorns
For the Vol-au-Vent
2 sheets of puff pastry (feel free to make this yourself if you’re that hardcore)
2 dough cutting rings, ideally fluted. One needs to be at least 1cm bigger than the other in diameter. The ideal would be 7cm and 5cm.
1 egg for the eggwash
For our sauce
2l chicken stock (which we’ll make as part of the recipe so don’t worry about buying this if you’re following all the steps here)
1 chicken (we get this from our stock chicken but if you’re buying stock separately, you’ll need about 700g)
300g mince (the type you prefer - traditionally it’s veal, but I usually use pork)
400g mushrooms (I like small white buttons for this but go with any type you prefer)
70g flour
45 g butter
1 whole nutmeg
The juice of 1 lemon
A few tablespoons (30ml-ish) of double cream
Optional: veal sweetbread
Optional: brown shrimp
Method
Stock
Roughly chop all the vegetables and place them in a large stockpot along with the chicken. Fill with water until everything is submerged. Bring to a boil then lower to a simmer. Skim off any stuff you don’t like the look of (don’t be too squeamish).
After about 90 minutes of simmering run everything through a fine sieve. For this recipe you’ll need about 2 litres of stock. Jar all the superfluous stock for anything else you might want to make. Reduce the 2 litres you’ll be using down to about a third of its original volume. Season with salt and pepper. After the chicken has cooled down, pick as much meat as you can from the bones. Discard the bones, fridge the meat as we’ll be needing this later.
Vol-au-vent
You can go and check our our video for this as the method hasn’t changed.
quenelles
This is what you call meatballs if want to sound fancy. Take your mince and (if you want it to be really nice) knead in an egg and some breadcrumbs. Season with salt, pepper, mace, some Worcestershire sauce and any other flavourings you like. Now roll all your mince into little balls and blanche them in boiling water. When they’re all floating on the surface (3-5 mins depending on how big your balls are) drain them and set aside.
Mushrooms
Chop your mushrooms into your desired size. When using small buttons I chop them in half, normal mushrooms get quartered.
Take a pan and let some oil get ripping hot. Throw in your chopped mushrooms and turn the heat down to medium low. Season with plenty of salt and pepper, and add a tiny knob of butter.
Once the mushrooms get some colour you can deglaze the pan with a little bit of lemon juice then set aside.
Sweetbreads(optional)
If you’re not scared of some offal, get one or two veal sweetbreads (this is the calf’s thymus). The night before cooking them, wedge them between two sheets of baking paper, put some weight atop them and leave them in the fridge. This “should” compress them making them less likely to fall apart when frying (results will… vary).
Chop them into roughly 1 cm cubes. Fry them up in some butter, season with salt and pepper and set aside.
Sauce
So Carême called this a béchamel; Escoffier referred to it as a “sauce Parisienne” (not wanting to use the term Allemande for some reason…) - safe to say that the preferences and definitions have shifted over time. Both of them refer to the “mother sauce” as velouté so I tend to refer to this as a velouté,
Take a saucepan and melt the butter in this. Once the butter has melted add in your flour and start stirring, I prefer to use a wooden spoon at this stage. The combined mixture is called a roux (if you’re a beginner - this is the original “bisto”). Now add in your reduced stock bit by bit. I like to use a small ladle for this step. Add in a splash of stock, stir it into the roux until homogenous, then repeat. Do this until all your stock is used up. Your saucepan should now contain a rich, shiny velvety sauce. It should already taste “nice” but we’re going to get it to taste great. Season with salt, pepper and some nutmeg (freshly grated). When it tastes really nice, add in a small dash of lemon juice.
Now we mix everything into a “salpicon” (don’t worry, it just means a bunch of things mixed in a sauce).
Take your chicken, meatballs and mushrooms and stir them into the sauce. If you got brown shrimp (provided they’re ready to eat) and fried sweetbread, let these join in too. In other words: everything but your vol-au-vents get chucked into the sauce!
Some of these ingredients will give off some liquid causing your velouté to get a bit runnier, this is why we do this step on medium low to low heat, so the sauce can thicken again. Once the sauce has regained its previous consistency, add a dash of cream, let it thicken again while seasoning it to taste. Apart from salt and pepper you might want to add in a bit more lemon juice. Make sure that the cream has dissolved into the sauce before adding in any extra lemon juice as we don’t want to curdle the cream!
Now serve into a vol-au-vent tower.
Your finished bouchée à la reine