Category: cooking

Bro. Do you even bake?

The recipe for the famous Tartine country loaf is less helpful than advertising for the bakery and new age woo woo. Pretentious garbage, really. Here is my consolidating upon a practical, clear recipe for sourdough bread. The only ingredients should be flour, water, and salt. The bread should be a crusty, rustic, (mostly) whole grain.

Grow a Starter

In the morning, add 100g of unsifted, all-purpose (AP) flour and 100g of water to a tall, lidded, glass jar. Stir with a spatula, and leave it sit, covered in a warm place all day. The environment should be distinctly warm, and so this often means turning on the oven at its lowest setting for a few hours (e.g. bake at 170°F).

Every morning, pour off all but about 125g of the starter. Use this poured-off batter to make a fry bread with sesame oil & scallions & five spice, or do something fancier. Add 50g of unsifted AP flour & 50g of water to the starter, stir with a spatula, and scrape down the insides of the jar. As usual, the environment should be warm.

Your starter is ready for bread when it is frothy & bubbly, and doubles in size by the afternoon. This will probably take a week-or-so of daily feedings.

Make a Leaven

The night before you want to bake bread, spoon a heaping tablespoon of starter into a large glass bowl. Add 75g of warm (80°F) water, and 75g of unsifted AP flour, and stir with a spatula. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap, poke a few holes, and leave it to sit overnight at room temperature.

After making the leaven, tuck your starter into the refrigerator and stop feeding. When you want to bake bread again, remove the starter from the refrigerator in the evening, and feed it in the morning as usual for a few days.

The next morning, confirm that a teaspoon of your leaven spooned off the top can float in a bowl of water. Your leaven may need more time or warmth. If so try again at lunchtime.

Mixing

Add 650g of warm (80°F) water to your leaven, and stir it until only a few clumps remain. Add 325g of unsifted AP flour and 700g of unsifted whole wheat flour to the bowl. Work the dough until all the flour is just wet. Let this rest covered for 45 minutes, for the autolyse.

Dissolve 20g of salt in 50g of water. Use a salt with lots of minerals, like sea salt or even plain ‘ole iodized. Pour the salt water over the dough, and repeatedly pinch to incorporate.

This dough is about 71% hydrated, ignoring that first tablespoon of starter. And the dough is relatively stiff, especially compared with the trendy overly-hydrated recipes.

Fermentation

Leave the dough covered at room temperature. Every 30 minutes, with your hands wet from washing, pull up & fold the dough from the side of the bowl. Do this 4 times with a quarter turn of the bowl between each folding. So that’s 4 folds every 30 minutes for 3 hours. Put 6 counters next to the bowl as a physical mnemonic, removing one each folding.

Shaping

Cut the dough in half with a metal dough scraper. Half of the dough will be about 955 grams. Punch and fold out internal air pockets, and then scoop the two boules into rough spheres. Cover the boules with bowls, and let them bench rest for 30 minutes.

Using a metal dough scraper, pull the boule of dough along the sticky countertop, to develop surface tension. Turn the football shape and pull again. Do this just until a bit of tearing occurs on the surface.

Generously flour a clean towel with rice flour, firmly pressing the rice flour into the towel. Flip a boule onto the center of the floured towel, leaving the seamed side facing upward. Lift the boule and its towel like a hammock, and drop it into a large bowl or bread basket. Cover, and repeat with the other boule.

Proofing

Leave the bowls in the refrigerator overnight, to proof.

Baking

Preheat the oven to 500°F. Place a sheet of parchment on top of an oven-proof plate, and turn the parchment & plate upside-down onto one of the proofing bowls. Flip the whole bundle upside down, to drop the boule onto the parchment. Set aside the towel and proofing bowl. Brush off the rice flour.

Score the top of the boule deeply with a wet knife.

Cover the plate, parchment, and boule with the base of a dutch oven. (Do not use the lid.) Bake for 20 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 450°F, open the oven door briefly to cool the oven, and bake covered for another 10 minutes. Remove the dutch oven from the plate & parchment, and continue to bake uncovered for 25 minutes. Cool the boule.

Saison

Dinner at Saison was really solid. Spectacular service with attention to detail, an open kitchen with almost-haphazard arrangements of tables around the high-ceilinged, taxidermied space. The smell of the wood-fired stove filled the room. Our winter menu was from late December, 2019. My favorite beverage was a sake, Shirataki’s Jozen Mizunogotoshi (junmai ginjo).

  • We started with champagne and tea made from a bundle of herbs in water. This reminded me of putting a sachet of herbs de Provence in a broth.
  • Then tiny cuts of sea bream sashimi seared on charcoal, served with sea lettuces, orange yuzu, sesame seeds in an oil, and sriracha chili water.
  • Lovely “nose to tail” dish of dungeness crab, featuring every part of the animal including the tomalley. Served with a thick almond milk sauce, and grapefruit.
  • Seared scallop in an oily berbere-like sauce. My wife had a tofu dish with carrots & kimchi.
  • Then we had trout with its roe alongside fartichokes, higher quality than the aquacultured McFarland Springs trout that’s everywhere else now-a-days.
  • Tiny white bread poppy seed rolls, served warm in a little basket on the table.
  • Black cod served with a chestnut puree, and a punchy (miso?) broth.
  • One of our favorite items was uni served over a piece of grilled sourdough, looking a bit like nigiri. The texture was wet from a bread sauce being spooned over, presumably made from their house-fermented bread hanging above the kitchen.
  • Spectacularly-beautiful radish dish, with a variety of colorful radishes & radish greens & flowers presented on a high, white plate.
  • Venison loin sous vide with raw garlic inside, in a demi sauce with ribbons of pickled kohlrabi & grated horseradish, and chanterelles.
  • The standout of the meal was the roasted honey nut squash mashed with a crunchy breadcrumb & herb mixture that tasted like Israeli salad.
  • Weak cheese course that was a bland, soft buffalo cheese wrapped in banana leaves and served with a nice flatbread cracker. Given the high bar of Saison’s ingredients, I would have preferred an actual, editorial cheese course.
  • Then a persimmon and creme fraiche dish, less savory.
  • The first dessert was a disappointment. Something with candy cap mushrooms & chocolate & tea, but the mushroom just ate gimmicky. I would preferred something baked cake-y or tart-y with more crunch, acid, and texture.
  • The second dessert with huckleberry & yuzu was for my birthday, and was very nice.

Review: Al’s Place

(1 out of 5 stars)

If you were to draw-up a list of the saddest fashions, affectations, ill-placed culinary passions, and grande cooking mistakes of the last few years, I think Al’s Place would solidly tick Every. Single. Box. This place is a living, breathing, performative satire of what fine dining should be.

First the place has no air conditioning and a single, beleaguered bathroom. I stood in line waiting to wash my hands, sweating from the warm San Francisco evening, and swapped places with a pregnant woman behind me who was certainly in more dire straits.

Clearly someone has pretenses of being a DJ, since they blare music so loudly that I could not hear anyone at my table a couple feet away. This was the recurring leitmotif of our dinner, and the main reason every one of us was hurrying through our mains and skipping dessert to just get out. Our first server was replaced by someone manager-ish, but they nonetheless misheard part of our order and just straight-up missed one of our wine requests. Each time we caught the attention of a new server, food runner, or host, we adulted and asked that the music be turned down. Call me crazy, but sometimes I go to a restaurant to get to know my companions better, as well as eat some neckbeard / topknot’s confusion cuisine. One of the servers eventually said the loud music was just the “vibe” of the restaurant, and we literally laughed out loud. At one point the woman at the table next to me leaned over, closely, to commiserate about the music. Most of the people in my row of table seats were physically leaning forward to yell. The place was so loud that when we asked for bowls for our shared soup, we were told they had heard us say we did not want them. And so on. The music itself? The usual quirky and dated garbage from the 90s, with a whiff of the post-ironic.

Their menu is a complete mess. First of all, they are too lazy to time the meal correctly and plate their dishes. Al’s Place calls this “family-style” or something, but its just cynical. Compounding this, neither of our two servers could actually tell us how much food to order for our party size, because there was no relationship between the section of the menu and the amount of food that ends up in front of you. There was some myth-making about “chef” wanting to treat proteins as a side, because they think this a comment on steak houses. But note that a real steak house can serve a plate of hot food umm, hot. Eventually we were able to map which lines on the menu were tastes, starters, mains, and sides, but to get this done meant literally taking out a piece of paper and a pen. I wish I was kidding: While negotiating with our servers about Lana Del Lame in background, we wrote our own translation of the Al’s Place menu, from hipsteraunt to English. After delivering an incorrect item with no explanation of what it was, they told us we should not have taken a bite before telling them it was wrong. How else were we supposed to find out what it was?!

The food is… fine. Their french fries were undercooked and soggy, but boy were they salty! Or should I say “brined.” The smoky mayonnaise alongside was too sweet and tasted like a dessert. Marlowe’s fries were better a decade ago. The Al’s Place lettuces were meant to be eaten by hand — see my queuing up for the bathroom sink, above — and for some reason had a bland avocado mousse streaked underneath. Can we please stop putting sauces under the food, to trick wraithy Instagrammers from LA into actually eating a sauce? The Progress does the reversed-salad-thing better. The chickpeas and harissa had some refrigerator burn to the legumes. The cold chickpea salad at Hey Day is better. The Al’s Place bean soup was overseasoned and was a bad seasonal choice to have on the menu during hot weather. But hey, they’ll put kimchee in it so you can think it’s exotic. Or something. The minestrone at any one of a dozen Italian joints in North Beach is better. The Al’s smoked brisket needed to have its fat better trimmed, and ended up tasting more lukewarm St. Patrick’s Day-corned-beef than cozy passover seder.

We only passed on one of our tastes of wine, so an actual professional was involved in their wine list at some point. They had no beers on draught, which is weak in a drinking town like SF. Also there is no hard liquor license, so your cocktails will be those sweet sherry & vermouth-heavy shims instead of a before-dinner classic like a Manhattan.

Al’s Place joins Hakkasan and The Progress as the two dinners that have me doubting the Michelin guide’s star ratings. The Michelin guide used to be insulated from silly trends and dopey culinary tricks, but they are clearly lowering their standards to appeal to teh youths. Al’s Place is also in that rarified competition of least bang for the buck, alongside the stunningly overrated and overpriced Hashiri.

Avoid Al’s Place like the plague. There are many San Francisco restaurants that do the quirky, opinionated, idiosyncratic faux-casual thing better.

Review: Moongate Lounge

(2 out of 5 stars)

Excellent dimsum with just enough cross-cultural elements of comfort food to be playful and interesting. That said, the entire front of the house at Moongate should be scrapped and re-hired.

First the godawful seating: We lucked-out and were able to insist on real chairs instead of the cheap, dopey, upholstered, 70s-garbage-couches in the center of the room. I felt sorry for another customer who was limited in mobility but was still expected to perch in these trainwrecks for her meal. I do not even want to think about fire safety in a place like this.

The cocktails were cloyingly sweet, under-diluted, and served too warm. They have the usual hipster quirky ingredients (e.g. celery), but the bartenders here need to go back to basics: A cocktail is not a sugar bomb to cover up the taste of liquor, but a by-definition spirit-forward balance between high-quality base liquors and a few complementary flavors. Any of a giant list of San Francisco bars do the cocktail thing right: Third Rail, Trick Dog, Cockscomb, Bix. If the techbro-ette wearing a fedora indoors sends back her martini because it is “too strong,” then you are doing it right. We also made the mistake of ordering a red by the glass, which was an overpriced mess, barely a five ounce pour and served too warm. It had no nose, no legs, no body, and no personality.

The service, oh good-God-the-service: Anonymous, underfed, morose hipsters slouching through the motions, in a poseur’s mid-century modern fever dream of an enjoyable night. The servers clearly want this place to feel like the space age 70s, but it just comes across as hilarious and desperate, like a Lana Del Rey video on xanax. Stop trying to be quirky and cute, and start paying attention to the details. What would make your customers enjoy themselves more? What would service from the actual 70s have been like?

Hot Hands

As someone who flirts with the hospitality industry, I actually find handwashing morbidly fascinating. The CDC has officially changed its stance on the temperature you should use for washing, saying cold water is similarly effective, while being more carbon friendly. The study that underlies this change is called “Handwashing Water Temperature Effects on the Reduction of Resident and Transient (Serratia marcescens) Flora when using Bland Soap,” published in 2001 by Barry Michaels et al. The study seemed flawed to me, so I asked someone I respect who is a practicing American MD with two specialties, internal medicine and interventional radiology. He knows about washing hands.

Four whole people were sampled! Dumb bad or good luck could bolster or refute this “study.” Having said this, I could believe it. But this did not account for the water temperature effects on soap, just bacteria. Soap work based on micelles [an aggregate of molecules in a colloidal solution]. And micelles have to contact a hydrophobic and hydrophilic item to work. Hard and soft water differences with soap and its temperature come to mind. I am a bottom line physiology thinker here: When molecules move faster, there is more effect from the movement. Why does the body innately increase its temperature when infected? And why serratia [a bacteria responsible for hospital infections] of all choices!?

I am going to stick with hot water hand washing, for now.

Sons & Daughters

Menu notes from dinner at Sons & Daughters in San Francisco on October 20th, 2017.

  • Aperitif was a glass of Cava
  • Taste was a leek and beluga caviar tartlet (crunchy)
  • Glass sphere w/ celery broth, dehydrated okra seeds, chestnut puree, and hipster bacon
  • Salad of abalone & cabbage, w/ black garlic puree & mild pistachio butter
  • Broccoli rabe, radish, tomatillo salsa (very off, chemically flavor)
  • Delicata squash roasted & pureed, linguini of Granny Smith apples, shaved dehydrated foie gras
  • Very al dente purple barley w/ lobster mushrooms & dark roasted mushroom broth (barely there tarragon)
  • Bavette steak (yawn) stuffed w/ truffles & salsify a few ways
  • Set “Japanese cheesecake” of Big Rock Blue w/ quince (awful, sent it back)
  • Limequat ice cream, buckwheat honey, fennel meringue
  • Sous vide sesame cake w/ dehydrated buttermilk sprinkles, agastache greens, frozen carrot puree
  • Bookended meal w/ a chocolate & honey sphere tartlet

Motoi

Menu notes from our dinner at Motoi in Kyoto, Japan on May 13th, 2017.

  • aperitif: Rice flour dumpling
    (deep-fried rice flour dumpling, stuffed w/ a bit of sweet bean paste, wrapped in prosciutto)
  • amuse-bouche: Firefly squid, beans, potato mouse
    (flute w/ white potato mousse, green peas, broad beans, squid, topped w/ a soft consomme jelly)
  • porc: Baked pork back ribs Cantonese style
    (small slices of tea-marinaded fatty pork w/ crisped skin, strawberries & Italian basil)
  • pousse de bambou: Kyoto’s fresh bamboo shoot, wakame soup
    (lukewarm wakame soup w/ fresh bamboo & shiitake mushrooms & sansho leaf, confused but tasty)
  • asperge blanche: White asparagus
    (shredded white asparagus, noodles, caviar, edible flowers w/ thin onion-y aioli)
  • ris de veau: Sauted sweet bread and herb salad
    (sauteed sweetbreads, bitter green leaves, balsamic vinaigrette drizzled at the last minute)
  • poisson: Panfried Japanese bluefish, Kyoto’s bracken, butter sauce
    (wild bracken, onion bulb heads, beurre blanc w/ tomato concasse)
  • boeuf: roasted Ozaki beef
    (rare, tendon-y wagyu beef, fiddlehead ferns, white onion, w/ cherry demi sauce)
  • dessert-1: Walnuts with lemon
    (walnut ice cream, lemon granita, icy)
  • dessert-2: Banana, coconutscream, rasberry [sic]
    (coconut & raspberry frozen cream wrapped in a brown banana fruit leather, candy-like)
  • dessert-3: Miyazaki’s mango
    (mango, Campari liquid nitrogen granita, meringue shingles, white miso whipped cream, fromage blanc ice cream)
  • mignardises
    (tea & chocolate macarons, champagne meringue cookies, cannelle, also rosewater jelly, chocolate & coconut truffle, cinnamon curl cookie)

Atalier Crenn

We had dinner at Atalier Crenn on Friday night, and here are details on her menu:

  • White chocolate shell filled w/ cider, topped w/ creme de cassis jelly (Kir Breton / “Spring has come with its cool breeze”)
  • Trout roe in a tiny buckwheat cheese tart, and black truffle & citrus salad w/ greens (Citrus, Golden Trout Roe, Black Truffle / “Orbs of the air, earth, and sea coalesce”)
  • Shreds of fried potatoes w/ seaweed powder and gold flake & smoked trout w/ foie gras mousse & foie gras crunchy skin & Greek yogurt cream (Fish & Chips / “In search of those swimming creatures, tasty and crispy”)
  • Leek, fennel, (olive?) oil broth, sushi rice paddy w/ kombu, butter poached sea urchin w/ sesame seeds (Koshihikari Rice, Wakame, Barigoule / “Come with me and look into the golden light”)
  • Caviar w/ rice cream (koji?) & salty, buttery, seaweed-crusted rutabaga (Caviar, Rutabaga, Koji / “A burst of oceanic feeling, salty black pearls”)
  • Abalone slices w/ oyster cream, egg yolks & brioche w/ fine herbes butter, whipped beef fat butter (Abalone, Roasted Garlic, Oyster Cream / “The whimsically ebullient blue umami”)
  • Morels w/ lardo & parmesan custard, pine nuts, smoked creme fraiche spheres (Morrel, pint [sic] Nu, Parmesan Custard / “Earthly song of the elfin singers”)
  • Wagyu beef, pickled carrot jelly, edible flowers, roasted chicken cognac sauce (A-5 Wagyu, Foraged Spring Herbs, Carrot Veil / “Under a shroud stirs the tender-footed beast”)
  • Harbison cheese tart, onion marmalade, quince, zucchini weave cover (Cow’s Milk Cheese, Quince, Onion Marmalade / “Green lattice, in dulcet reminiscence”)
  • Pistachio ice cream “olive” (green tea?) olive oil (Recreated Olive / “A precious token”)
  • Chestnut, sage cream in little chocolate egg shells & fillo ‘maki’ wrapped around yogurt, apple, fennel & blood orange ice, rosette of something pickled  (Egg of Chestnut & Sage / Toasted Fillo, Yogurt, Apple, Fennel / Blood Orange Ice / “Walking deep in the woods” / “Strolling on, into the orchard” / “As the earth might have something to spare”)
  • Sorrel, mint sponge w/ pine nuts, blackberries reconstructed from spheres, stuffed w/ ice cream & shaved dark citrus cookie shaved like truffle (“The Forest” / “Spring has come and is full of sweet surprises”)
  • Tree of meringue cookies w/ calabash (?) jam, raspberry w/ chocolate jellies, nougat squares & box of chocolates, a white chocolate bark, white chocolate w/ coffee bonbon, Peruvian dark chocolate square truffle (Mignardises / “Sweetness, bounty, thanks”)
  • Granola sticks to takeaway

Happy Birthday, Hipsteraunt

Last month was the two year anniversary of the website Hipsteraunt, which I built with my friend Lance Arthur. He did the design, I did the random menu generation. It is a quirky bit of AI and NLP under-the-hood, so a user gets menus featuring free-range suspended chicken feet, truffled shisito pepper with achiote, and marshmallow crudo, at a place with an ampersand in its name. The inspiration had been a particular dinner out in San Francisco, at an immensely overrated restaurant. But it could have been Brooklyn or the West Loop. I am a quant & machine learning researcher by happy vocation, but also a chef by training. (Le Cordon Bleu with honors, thank you.) So the term “foodie” has always struck me as what privileged folks call themselves when they like to eat fancy food, but would not be caught dead hanging out with a line cook.

Hipsteraunt remains a tender satire of a certain sort of fetishized dining out. It was meant to be an acerbic call to check-your-privilege, together with a reminder that nothing in food is new. No combination of ingredients or flavors has not been tried a thousand times before. Even offal and the Asian flavors everyone loves to exoticize. (Awkward…) We lived through the fusion cuisine of the 1980s, remember? In hindsight, it might have cut a bit too close to the bone. The site garnered plenty of attention, but less heady pokes like the fake Guy Fieri menu and the brilliant Jacques le Merde have been far more successful. An annoying bug with making menu URLs permanent snagged things up the first couple weeks, too. Nonetheless on Hipsteraunt’s second birthday, I celebrate by raising an artisanal cocktail (a lemongrass aviation, perhaps) and toasting the addition of a few new ingredients: Keep an eye out for those trendy signifiers of faux-edgy cuisine we all love, like burrata and purslane, za’atar and togarashi. Goodbye ginger, goodbye almond milk. But it looks like bacon is still there.

 

Just Put the Bird in the Fucking Oven

Every year there seems to be some elaborate new Thanksgiving turkey preparation technique. For a while we were all deep-frying the poor things, and our parents once tried putting a can of soda in the cavity. To baste from within, or something. By 2014 we have probably reached peak turducken, but nesting poultry is still a thing. Other tricks like butterflying (spatchcocking) and brining will have their day. These techniques have one thing in common. There is always the one anecdote of success, and a quiet majority that knows turducken was still pretty bland.

Yes the turkey is the focus of the Thanksgiving meal, but that does not mean it should be the focus of our cooking efforts. Look — turkeys are incredibly lean birds. They lack duck’s self-basting fattiness, or a chicken’s mild but distinctive flavor. Instead of endangering your porch or driveway with a dubious single-purpose deep-fryer, just put the bird in the fucking oven. Turkey is always dry, and you should accept the zen of this statement. Focus on your vegetable sides and gravy, and you will have a much better dinner.

Here is how to do Thanksgiving turkey right:

  1. Order an organic, hormone-free, all-natural, free-range, beer-fed, daily-massaged, Wagyu, Angus turkey from a farm in Portland. Or do whatever is your closest approximation. Preferably he’s named Colin. (Yes, all eating turkeys are male, because the females lay eggs. Duh.) This might be the only decision that will actually matter for the bird’s taste and juiciness. Avoid a bird that has been frozen. Order about a pound of bird per person at your dinner, adjusting for kids and vegetarians.
  2. Preheat your over to 450 degrees fahrenheit, or whatever that is in Europe.
  3. Prepare a little bowl of seasoning. I like kosher salt, lots of cracked black pepper, minty and citrusy dried herbs like marjoram, and a pinch of sugar. You want several tablespoons of seasoning mix.
  4. Wash the bird inside and out, removing the giblets (offal) inside. Yes, washing poultry may get food-borne nasties like Salmonella all over your kitchen. That is why you have paper towels and a disinfectant handy. Also make sure the bird is fully plucked. An old pair of dull tweezers can help. The more hippie your bird (see #1 above), the more likely it is to have some lingering feathers.
  5. Dry the bird with paper towels. Brush him with melted butter, and then sprinkle all over with your seasoning mix.
  6. Turn the bird upside down on your roasting pan. This bastes the dry breasts with the meagre fat that is in the bird. Oh, and the butter. Butcher-tie the legs and wings close to the body, if you are feeling fancy.
  7. Just put the bird in the fucking oven.
  8. After about a half-hour, or whenever the bird gets brown, turn your oven down to 325 degrees. Then after about three hours more, check the temperature inside a thigh. You want at least 165 degrees fahrenheit, but remember the bird will continue to carry-over cook a bit after you pull it out of the oven. Do not baste the bird, since this loses the heat in the oven and does not help much anyway. Do not open the oven to peek and smell and fret every ten minutes, even if your guests have arrived. Do not cover just the right breast with aluminum foil, and do not stuff the bird. It will all work out, I promise.

The Gravy to End All Gravies

I have been proposed marriage by men and women both, for my gravy. Get some chicken stock and a glassful of sherry boiling in a sauce pain. Add the turkey giblets. Turkey kidneys for the win! If you have some mirepoix chopped-up (onions, carrots and celery), toss them in the pan. Simmer for 45 minutes-or-so.

Since you have been smart and not bothered basting the turkey (right?), your roasting pan probably has a bunch of browned juices and fat. This is fond, the nectar of the gods. Strain your simmering stock right into the roasting pan. Scrape all that lovely fond up into the liquid, with a wooden spoon. (If you do not have wooden cooking spoons, you are a bad person and will always be a failure as a cook.) Return the liquid to your sauce pan, and simmer for about 20 more minutes, then strain again into a new saucepan.

Make a roux in a non-stick pan on the side. I use bread flour and whole, unsalted butter in approximately equal portions by volume. (Don’t overthink this.) Stir the roux as your butter melts. If you want to feel southern, let the roux brown a little bit. Whisk the roux into your simmering stock, and boil for ten minutes to thicken. Add some lemon juice and a ton of salt. If the gravy does not taste right, add more salt. If it still does not taste right, add more salt.

I can hear you asking about the cornstarch… Remember that part about making the best gravy ever? This requires butter, as all good things do. Compared to the glory that is roux, cornstarch is weak sauce.