Sauces · Czech cuisine
Mushroom sauce
Czech houbová omáčka: mushrooms – typically porcini, commonly also button mushrooms – stewed with onion and parsley, bound with pale roux and sour cream.
At a glance
- Origin
- Czech cooking, documented in 19th- and 20th-century cookbooks.
- Production
- Mushrooms stewed with onion and parsley, pale roux with stock, sour cream.
- Ratio
- Janků-Sandtnerová for 5: 150 g fresh porcini, 40 g flour and 4 tablespoons sour cream.
- Pairs with
- Bread dumplings, meatloaf, boiled or roast meat.
- Use
- Can also be made with dried mushrooms pre-cooked in milk.
Mushroom sauce (houbová omáčka) is a Czech sauce of wild mushrooms, typically porcini, and commonly also of button mushrooms, thickened with a pale roux and finished with sour cream. It is served with dumplings, meatloaf or meat.
In 1947 Janků-Sandtnerová softens finely chopped onion and parsley in butter, adds thinly sliced fresh porcini, moistens them with stock and stews them until tender. She makes a pale yellow roux of butter and flour, thins it with stock, strains it onto the mushrooms, simmers, peppers and stirs in sour cream before serving. Dried mushrooms, she says, are first cooked in milk, chopped and then stewed like fresh ones.
In the 1849 German edition Rettigová gives a mushroom sauce of dried mushrooms: they are cooked in parsley water or fish stock, chopped with parsley and combined with a white roux. Unlike svíčková, its base is mushrooms rather than root vegetables.