Vol. XXII · Stocks, Soups and Sauces Plate 7 of 11pan sauce, deglazing, fond, reduction, monter au beurre, mounting with butter, shallots, wine, stock, steak sauce, resting, burner powerTH

Pan Sauces.

The brown crust left in the pan after a steak is the start of the sauce. Five minutes, a splash of wine, a knob of butter, and the steak has finished resting.

Searing meat leaves fond — browned, concentrated Maillard products stuck to the pan (VIII.7). A pan sauce reclaims it. Pour off excess fat, soften a little shallot, deglaze with wine, vermouth or stock while scraping, add stock, and boil hard to reduce until syrupy, which concentrates flavour (XXII.8) and, with a gelatin-rich stock, body. Off the heat, swirl in cold butter piece by piece: the butter melts into a fine emulsion held by the sauce's proteins and gelatin (monter au beurre), making it glossy and slightly thick (X.5). Finish with a squeeze of lemon, mustard, herbs, and the meat's resting juices.

Timing is the craft, because the sauce is made while the meat rests (II.9). Reducing is boiling water away: every gram of water needs about 2.26 kJ (VIII.2), so the time is set by how much liquid you start with, how far you reduce it and how much heat the burner puts into the pan (II.6). A wide pan helps only by letting the burner's heat reach more liquid; it cannot beat the burner. And the butter must go in off the boil: boiling breaks the emulsion and the sauce turns greasy. The workshop times the reduction.

Below: the minutes to heat the liquid you deglaze with to the boil and reduce it to the share you choose, on the burner you choose (exact energy balance with water's specific and latent heats), against the ten minutes a steak rests.

What you will learn
Workshop
Energy, exact for the water: heat V mL from 20 to 100 °C (4.186 J/g·K) and boil off the fraction 1 − f (2 257 J/g). Power actually delivered to the pan: home burner 1.2 kW, strong burner or induction 2 kW, wok burner 4 kW (teaching values, II.6). Wine and stock treated as water.

Deglaze, reduce, mount, while the meat rests

Reducing 300 mL of wine and stock to a third takes about 7.7 minutes on a home burner delivering 1.2 kW and 4.6 on a strong one — most of a steak's rest; 150 mL on the strong burner takes about 2.3, and 600 mL on the home burner about 15, longer than the meat should wait. So pan sauces use small amounts of liquid, deglaze in a pan already hot, and often start from a stock reduced in advance. A sauce for two needs only 150–200 mL.

Method for two steaks: after searing, pour off all but a spoonful of fat; over medium heat soften a chopped shallot for a minute; add 100 mL of red wine and scrape up the fond; boil until nearly syrupy; add 150 mL of stock (ideally gelatin-rich) and boil to about 80 mL; take off the heat, add the resting juices and whisk in 30 g of cold butter in pieces until glossy; season with salt and pepper, a little mustard or lemon. If the sauce breaks into grease, whisk in a spoonful of cold water or cream off the heat. A Chinese wok sauce uses the same fond logic but finishes with a starch slurry instead of butter (XXII.9).

At the stove

Sear a steak; while it rests, make a pan sauce with 150 mL of liquid and time each step with a clock.

Monter au beurre, "to raise with butter", is a restaurant habit that made French sauces glossier and richer in the twentieth century as heavy flour-thickened sauces fell out of fashion; nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s built whole menus on reductions finished with butter.

Terms

Deglazing
Dissolving the fond with a liquid (VIII.7).
Monter au beurre
Swirling cold butter into a sauce off the heat to emulsify it.
Fond
The browned residue left in a pan after searing.
Nappe
A sauce just thick enough to coat a spoon.
A pan sauce deglazes the fond, reduces, and is mounted with cold butter off the heat. Reducing is boiling water away — about 2.26 kJ a gram — so use little liquid and make it while the meat rests.

Sources

  1. IAPWS, Revised Release on the IAPWS Industrial Formulation 1997 for the Thermodynamic Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS-IF97), region 4 (saturation).
  2. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.
  3. H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.