When I cook dinner for myself, I normally don’t want to go through any elaborate procedures. I want something good and tasty, of course, but most of the time I don’t want to go through the process of making a fancy sauce. Actually, that isn’t totally true. Sauces are not hard to make or time consuming or anywhere near as involved as most people think they are.
Find more of Chef Smitty’s sauce recipes
If you have a good demi, or base, you can make all kinds of sauces in less than 2 minutes. The key is having that demi, which few people will have. Demi glaze is just a beef or veal stock reduced down to a concentrated level that is gelatinous in texture or reduced by about 10 times the amount you started with, hence demi, which means 10.
You can change the sauce by adding different ingredients such as port, red wine, sherry or other alcohols and letting that reduce before you add the water.
But wait, just because there is no demi, doesn’t mean you can’t have a good sauce for the entrée. Most people don’t have a demi available because they don’t want to take the time to make it. It can take up to three days of simmering depending on the size of the batch to get a good demi. I usually make a good-sized batch and freeze it in small containers.
But let’s backtrack for a second and think logically. All a stock is on the basic level is bits of meat and bone browned off in a pan and then boiled. Reduce that by 10, or whatever, and you have your demi. Sure there are other ingredients added depending on the chef, but that is the main jest of it. Now, we take that over to your normal dinner and what are you doing? You are cooking the meat, which is the browning process, but you obviously leave out the boiling part.
This is where the pan sauce comes in. Once the meat has been cooked off, the normal thing to do is to simply put it on a plate and call it done. Once you put the meat on a plate, you usually place the pan in the sink, add some water and let it soak while you eat, so it is easier to get all that hard stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan off.
Instead of filling the pan with water and letting it soak, put a cup or so of water in it and put it back on the stove to boil. Use a wooden spoon to scrape all the hard, crispy stuff off the bottom of the pan. You will see the liquid getting a nice golden brown as all those crispy little specks dissolve into the liquid creating your stock. If you let that reduce down, you end up with your demi or, in this case, a great pan sauce. It really is that simple.
You can change the sauce by adding different ingredients such as port, red wine, sherry or other alcohol and letting that reduce before you add the water. You also can substitute cream for the water for some sauces. The point is, pan sauces are simple to make, add a lot of flavor to your entrée and you get the added benefit of having an easier pan to clean because the boiling has gotten all the stuff you would have had to scrape off the bottom of the pan.
Here’s a pan sauce using cream instead of water, but you can use water if you want. Enjoy.
Pan sauce
4 servings of beef tenderloin
2 T whole peppercorns
1 T butter
1 t oil
3 oz. cognac
8 oz. heavy cream
Use the bottom of the pan and crush the peppercorns. Lightly salt the beef and coat both sides with the peppercorns. Do not use a coated pan, if possible. Get the oil and butter hot in the pan and sear the meat on both sides so it is rare to medium rare and remove from the pan. Away from the stove, add 2 oz. of the cognac, light it to burn off the alcohol and place the pan back on the stove. Reduce until almost gone. Add the cream and reduce until it coats the bottom of a spoon. Season with salt and add the rest of the cognac to taste.
