We consider ourselves good cooks, but there are the few occasions in which a cooking endeavor goes totally wrong. This past weekend, we decided to experiment in making our own white cream sauce, after taking inventory of the contents of the fridge and realizing that we were limited to cheese, cream, milk and orange juice.. It seemed easy! Just combine cheese, cream, milk, butter, some seasoning, and out would emerge a delicious creamy pasta sauce. Or so it seemed... We began by melting butter in a saucepan and slowly mixing in cream and grated parmesan cheese. Our intentions were to simply melt all the ingredients together until the mixture reached the correct consistency, yet we failed to realize that as the ingredients warmed together, they began to thicken not into a creamy sauce, but into what looked to us like clumpy gruel. Thinking that we would be able to cook the clumps out, we kept heating the mixture and found that in "reducing" the sauce, we only made it less liquid and more clumpy! In one final futile attempt to salvage our dinner, we decided to mix it in with the pasta and take a taste..upon which we realized with much dissapointment that it was totally inedible.
One may ask why would we post a story like this on a cooking blog? Becuase we believe that failures provide inspiration in cooking. After tasting our gruel pasta, we were inspired to discover what went wrong, and how we could learn how to make a cream sauce to rival those so easily whipped up by our Italian friends! It is easy to think that when cooking a meal, you simply mix in all the ingredients, and out comes a delicious concoction, pouf! But this is evidently not the case...
Because of this experience, we have been inspired to create our own cream sauce, through testing out recipes and adding our own ingredients and flavors.
More to come.
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