Vol. VIII · Browning Plate 7 of 9fond, deglazing, pan sauce, reduction, wine, stock, searing, stainless steel, crowdingTF

Fond and Deglazing.

After a steak comes out of the pan, the best part of it may still be stuck to the bottom.

Meat in a hot pan leaks a little juice — proteins, sugars, salts. Where it touches the hot metal the water boils off at once and what is left browns and sticks: the fond (French for "base"). It is a thin, concentrated layer of Maillard products (VIII.1), and it dissolves readily in water, wine or stock. Pouring in liquid and scraping it up — deglazing — turns it into the base of a pan sauce in a minute.

Fond needs two things: a pan the juices stick to (stainless steel or cast iron; non-stick coatings leave little), and enough heat that the juice evaporates and browns instead of pooling. Overload the pan and its temperature falls towards 100 °C, the juice collects, and the meat stews in it — no fond, no crust (XV.3). The workshop sears meat in a stainless pan and then reduces the sauce.

Below: the pan's temperature after cold meat goes in, for a light load, a heavy load and yours (stove bench), and the minutes to reduce the deglazing liquid on the same burner.

What you will learn
Workshop
Stove bench: a 26 cm stainless pan on a 3 kW gas burner, preheated six minutes and held below 230 °C, then meat from the fridge for eight minutes; fond is the course browning measure of the juice on the pan. Reduction: 70 % of the burner's delivered heat boils off water, about 2.26 kJ per gram.

Scrape up the flavour

With 250 g of meat the stainless pan dips to only 214 °C and the juice browns on contact: the fond is fully brown, 1.00 on the course scale. With 900 g it falls to 112 °C, the juice pools and the fond reaches only 0.54, and the meat's surface is stewing in that pool. Sear in batches, and leave space between pieces.

Then deglaze. Pour off most of the fat, return the pan to the heat, add 200 mL of wine or stock and scrape the fond up with a wooden spoon as it boils. Reducing that to 40 % on the same burner takes about 5.4 min and concentrates everything dissolved in it 2.5 times — taste before salting, because salt concentrates too. Finish off the heat with a knob of cold butter swirled in (mounting, XXII.7), and the juices that collected under the resting meat. If the fond is black rather than brown, it is burnt and bitter (VIII.8); wipe the pan and start the sauce without it.

At the stove

Sear chicken thighs skin-side down in a stainless pan, lift them out, and look at the pan: the brown film is fond. Add a glass of water, scrape and boil it for two minutes. Taste the liquid: it is already a light sauce.

Chinese cooks use the same chemistry differently: a splash of Shaoxing wine around the hot rim of the wok (炝锅, XXVII.2) flashes into steam and lifts the browned film into the dish in a second.

Terms

Fond
The browned, stuck-on residue of juices left in a pan after searing.
Deglazing
Dissolving the fond with liquid to make a sauce.
Reduction
Boiling a liquid to evaporate water and concentrate flavour.
Pan sauce
A quick sauce made in the searing pan from fond, liquid and butter.
Fond is browned juice stuck to a hot pan; deglaze it with liquid and reduce. A crowded pan makes none.

Sources

  1. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.
  2. H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.