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My 5 Step Method for Preparing Professional Quality Brown Sauces...
As a home cook, one of the hardest things for me to accomplish when
first starting out was making a rich velvety brown sauce to serve on
steak, lamb, veal, pork, or even chicken. I could put together a
pretty good pan sauce using the dripping after sautéing or
roasting a piece of meat but it never quite had that incredible
intensity that I experience when dining out at a great restaurant.
It wasn't until I spent some time reading about sauce making and
speaking with a few chef friends that I learned it isn't so much
the "how to" but the "ingredients" that make the
difference. Using my 5-step method to make a great brown sauce is
easy if you have all the necessary ingredients and I will give you
some great resources for finding them.
What is a Sauce?
According to Food Lover's Companion, a sauce is "a thickened,
flavored liquid designed to accompany food in order to enhance and
bring out its flavor." Now that can cover a lot of territory.
It goes on to say, "In the days before refrigeration, however,
sauces were more often used to smother the taste of foods that had
begun to go bad." I'm sure we have all had experiences that
have proven this true even in the days of refrigeration. Think
back to your high school cafeteria.
But in the 19th century, the French created an intricate process for
making sauces that is still being taught in cooking schools all over
the world. This process involves numerous steps and if you have the
time, I highly recommend James Peterson's, "Sauces" and Raymond
Sokolov's "The Saucier's Apprentice". They are entirely devoted to
just this subject.
Why is it so difficult to make great sauces at home?
As Chef Alton Brown says in his cookbook, I'm Just Here For The
Food, "By and large, most home cooks don't do sauce - and
that's too bad. Traditional sauces are indeed scary."
The process just to prepare the key ingredients that go into a sauce
takes a lot of time. It starts by making a stock with roasted beef
and/or veal bones, reducing them for at least 12 hours, continuously
skimming the pot, straining the liquid to remove the bones, reducing
some more, adding a roux (a mixture of flour and water used as a
thickening agent) and you now have a nice brown sauce or sauce
espagnole.
A professional chef will then reduce this brown sauce further to
make a demi glace, the mother of all sauces. These guys spend a lot
of time in cooking school learning how to do this and take great
pride in the sauces they can make with it. These stock reductions
are the foundation to hundreds of classic sauces being served in
fine restaurants.
Why can't I just use a bouillon cube?
Unless you want to ruin an expensive cut of meat by covering it with
a salty, corn syrup reduction, I would stay away from bouillon cubes
or any of those cheap packets of instant sauces you see in your
local supermarket. Just look at the ingredients to see if what's
inside is real or simply processed. You can't build a sound house
without a strong foundation. The same is true when making sauces.
What's a home cook to do?
Since making a great sauce at home depends of finding a good stock
reduction or demi glace, I would like to offer you the following
resources.
- Make it yourself. A great experience but one most of us will
not take on.
- Make friends with the chef at your favorite upper end restaurant
and see if he or she will share some of their brown gold with you.
Be prepared to beg or pay through the nose to get them to part
with this stuff. Not likely, but worth a try.
- Hire a personal chef to make it for you. You may end up having
to subscribe to years worth of dinners, which isn't all that
bad, but you will have your demi.
- Buy it a high-end gourmet store. If you really search hard, you
may be able to find stock reductions in the refrigerator section
of some really high end stores. You won't get much, but you
don't need a lot and it won't be cheap.
- Williams-Sonoma is now selling their own stock reductions. I
have not had that much experience with them but they usually sell
high quality items.
- Find demi glace and stock reductions that are used in high-end
restaurants and are available to home cooks. More Than Gourmet
makes the best products I know of that fit that description. You
can learn all about these products and buy them on-line at
http://www.gatewaygourmet.com
My Quick & Easy 5 Step Method
Quick Look
- Sauté a shallot in butter
- Deglaze pan with wine
- Add demi glace
- Reduce
- Season with salt & pepper
More Details
1. Sauté a chopped shallot or small onion in one ounce of butter
(1/4 stick) for 1-2 minutes until translucent.
2. Deglaze with 1/2-cup red wine and reduce to an essence
(approximately one tablespoon of remaining liquid). Be sure to
remove the pan from the heat before deglazing.
3. Add 8 ounces of demi-glace.
4. Reduce the sauce until it is thick enough to coat a spoon.
5. Season with freshly ground pepper to taste.
One last item that is optional but often used by professional chefs
is a pat of butter. It adds a bit more flavor and shine to the
finished sauce.
Alternatives
At this point you have a delicious sauce that you can serve or use
as a base and layer in more flavors by adding additional ingredients
including fresh herbs and spices, fruits, chutneys, relish, or
cream.
If you are adding mushrooms or other ingredients that need to cook a
bit, add them to the pan right after you add the wine and let them
cook while the wine is reducing.
Copyright © 2003 G. Stephen Jones, The Reluctant Gourmet
G. Stephen Jones created the Reluctant Gourmet back in 1997
as a hobby to assist other novice cooks who may find
the art of cooking a little daunting. As an ex-Wall Street
broker and Stay-at-Home Dad, I try to explore cooking from
a different perspective. Visit http://www.reluctantgourmet.com/ for
more tips, techniques, and recipes.
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