Yesterday I posted a recipe for Eggplant Parmigiana by Chef Mark Vogel that would be served with a quick, homemade tomato sauce. Here is Mark’s personal favorite quick and easy tomato sauce that works with his eggplant parm but as a base for lots of recipes.

We all have our favorite formulas for making “gravy” and I would love to hear about how you make yours but this is a good one to start with if you are just learning how to cook. Feel free to make additions and/or substitutions to adjust the flavor to your own preference. I have one of my favorites from my friend Chef Ricco DeLuca at Basic Tomato Sauce.

Chef Mark Vogel’s Tomato Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 (35-oz.) can whole plum tomatoes
• 1 carrot, small dice
• 1 celery stick, small dice
• 1 small onion, diced
• Olive oil, as needed
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 3 garlic cloves, chopped
• 4 oz. red or white wine
• 8 oz. beef/veal stock
• Handful fresh chopped parsley

How to Make Fresh Tomato Sauce at Home

Straining the tomatoes

Place a fine mesh strainer over a bowl.  Split open each tomato over the strainer and remove the seeds, as they can add a bitterness to the sauce.  Place the seeded tomatoes in another bowl.  Reserve both the juice in the first bowl from seeding the tomatoes and the juice left in the can.

Sweat the carrot, celery and onion in olive oil with some salt and pepper on low/medium heat until soft.  Add the garlic and cook one more minute. Deglaze the pan with the wine and reduce until it reaches a syrupy consistency.

Add all of the reserved tomato juices and the stock. Bring to a simmer and reduce by at least half. A little more won’t hurt.

Add the reserved tomatoes and cook only 5-10 minutes on low heat. With an immersion blender, puree the sauce until smooth.

Finish with the parsley and additional salt and pepper if needed.

Chef Mark R. Vogel

The History of Brown Sauce - Part 1

Katherine of Aragon, (1485-1536), was the first, (and according to many), only legitimate queen of King Henry VIII.  Why the question of authenticity regarding her five successors?  Therein lies the linchpin to the entire English Reformation and the merciless bloodbath that ensued for decades.

Katherine, as beautiful as she was intelligent, married Henry VIII in 1509.  Henry was obsessed with producing a male heir to his throne.  Sadly, five of Katherine’s six pregnancies resulted in miscarriage, still birth, or infantile death.

Her only surviving scion was Mary, who would later rise to Queen regnant of England in 1553.  (Mary had a penchant for burning religious heretics at the stake which earned her the dubious nickname “Bloody Mary,” but that’s another story).

At the time, such failures in childbirth, if not blamed on sorcery or the wrath of God, were attributed to the mother, and Henry was no slouch when it came to ignorance or arrogance.  Henry endeavored to have his marriage to Katherine annulled but Pope Clement VII said no dice.  Henry, who by now had the hots for Anne Boleyn, broke with the Catholic Church and formed the Church of England, thus igniting the English Reformation.

Katherine was eventually banished from the court and exiled.  She recalcitrantly asserted till her death that she was Henry’s only sanctioned and true queen.  Considering that Anne Boleyn, and later Catherine Howard, (Henry’s 5th wife) each lost their heads, Katherine was lucky to only be outcast.

There is one other little tidbit about Katherine, obscure but nevertheless germane to our forthcoming discussion:  According to one professional culinary text, upon marrying Henry her retinue included a team of chefs.  These chefs introduced what we now call a Brown sauce or Espagnole sauce.

Origin Brown Sauce

Brown sauce, as the name implies, is a brown colored sauce, made from beef or veal stock, which is viscous and deeply flavored by meat and aromatic vegetables.  As stated, Brown sauce is also known as Espagnole, the French word for Spanish.

How it received that moniker is one of those murky, “depends on who you ask” conundrums.  While it implies the sauce hailed from Spain, (hence our Katherine of Aragon connection), other professional sources say it had nothing to do with Spain.

The “Oxford Companion to Food” asserts that it is a French reference to the skin tone of the Spaniards.  Katherine of Aragon by the way had a fair complexion, blue eyes, and reddish-blonde hair so go figure.

Even murkier is the origin of the sauce itself, namely the exact ingredients and techniques for making it.  Man had been making meat based sauces since time immemorial.  The earliest documented recipes for Brown sauce come from the 1600’s.

A Complicated Procedure

We do know that these seminal French versions of Brown sauce involved an extremely complicated procedure.  One of the traditional practices was cooking meat in water, then taking that broth and reducing it further with a new batch of meat.  This step was repeated a number of times until an intensely flavored and thick sauce was created.

This successive process required a large amount of meat, an expensive undertaking indeed.  To make matters worse it also often involved exotic ingredients such as partridge, liver, truffles, etc.  Over the years Brown sauce has morphed, influenced by motivations to reduce labor and financial cost.  It’s simply not practical for a large, modern kitchen to embrace such laborious and extravagant methodology when attempting to feed prodigious amounts of people.  Ergo, even at some of today’s most preeminent establishments, the brown sauces adorning their cuisine will be shadows of the archetypal creation.

Brown sauce was traditionally thickened, as stated, by successively reducing the cooking liquid to a syrupy consistency.  While evaporation is still always relied on, later chefs began adding flour to impart the sauce with body.  Some chefs abandon the flour in favor of butter, while others stick with reduction, albeit without successive additions of fresh meat.  Obviously, Brown sauce and all its offspring, pair exceedingly well with all kinds of red meat but can also be used on vegetables as well.

One of the 5 Mother Sauces

Brown sauce is one of the five “Grand” or “Mother” sauces of French cuisine, the other four being béchamel, tomato, velouté and hollandaise.  A Grand sauce is a base sauce from which a plethora of derivative sauces are then made.  Ready for a little more controversy? Once again, depending on the source, some acknowledge Brown sauce as a Grand sauce while others recognize demi-glace.

Demi-glace is made from Brown sauce, (which itself is made from stock), which technically renders the demi-glace a derivative and the Brown sauce a Grand sauce.  But most derivative sauces of Brown sauce require that a demi-glace be made first.  Thus, the demi-glace proponents view Brown sauce as an intermediate step to making demi-glace, which is the mother sauce of most ensuing Brown-sauce-based sauces.  For example, a Bordelaise sauce begins with demi-glace to which wine, beef marrow and seasonings are added and then reduced.

In the interest of clarity, the diagram below pictorially outlines the procedural stages we have thus far described.

Beef Stock  →  Brown Sauce  →  Demi-Glace  →  Final derivative sauces such as Bordelaise sauce, Robert sauce, Chasseur sauce or Madeira sauce.

Keep in mind that as mentioned, short cuts are often employed in the interest of efficiency and/or monetary cost.  For example, it’s not uncommon to find recipes that take stock, simmer it with some shallots and wine and then call it a Bordelaise sauce.  This is a desecration in my book.

If you love to cook, and are up for the task of making Brown sauce and demi-glace then I applaud you. Check out the recipes and procedures for making stock, then a Brown sauce, and then demi-glace. 

Chef Mark R. Vogel

Related Topics

Making Demi Glace at Home

Stocks & Stock Reductions

Beef Stock Recipe

Chicken Stock

Butter + Wine + Vinegar = Beurre Blanc

By Chef Mark Vogel

Nantes is a city in France, located on the Loire River in the region of Brittany. With a population in excess of 800,000 it is the 6th largest city in the country. Nantes was founded by the Namnètes, a Gallic tribe around 70 B.C.  The area is no stranger to territorial conquests and was successively occupied by the Gauls, the Romans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Britons and the Normans.

More sordid aspects of its history include its prominent role in the slave trade, internecine civil war during the French revolution, and being the site of thousands of executions.  Hopefully that’s all in the past as Nantes is now a center of commerce, culture, and education, and boasts a reputation for a high standard of living.  Nantes is also the credited birthplace, (with a slight caveat), of one of the classic sauces of French cuisine: beurre blanc.

Hollandaise Fish Story

My equivocation about Nantes’ recognition in the genesis of beurre blanc reflects the extant contrariety about the sauce’s origin.  While many explanations exist, a popular one is this:  Somewhere in the early 20th century a chef by the name of Clémence Lefeuvre, in a village nearby Nantes, (and thus not in Nantes proper), was purportedly making a béarnaise sauce for fish.  Somehow she forgot to include the eggs and serendipitously created a beurre blanc. The new sauce was a hit and a classic was born.

I find that fish story a little hard to swallow, specifically the oversight of the eggs.  To understand the dubiousness of this lapse, one must first understand what a béarnaise is.  A béarnaise sauce is a tarragon-flavored hollandaise sauce.

A hollandaise sauce starts with beaten egg yolks to which cold butter (and seasonings such as lemon juice, salt and pepper) is added. Thus, the eggs are an indispensible first step and building block of the sauce. Trying to make a hollandaise and “forgetting” the eggs would be akin to making pasta and “forgetting” the boiling water.

In any event, whatever the details may be, beurre blanc is a decadently delicious sauce that pairs exceedingly well with fish, but also many vegetable dishes. Moreover, it is relatively easy to make. But be forewarned, it is literally not for the “faint of heart.”

Beurre blanc is exceedingly rich, cloying with the butter that forms its backbone.  So if you’re not cardiac or saturated fat-challenged, or simply allow for occasional indulgence, then grab your whisk and let’s hit the stove.

Making Beurre Blanc

Beurre blanc begins with a “reduction,” i.e., a seasoned fluid that is cooked to concentrate its viscosity and flavor.  The liquid is usually an admixture of white wine and white wine vinegar, combined with shallots, salt and pepper. Muscadet, a crisp and acidic wine from the Loire Valley is the traditional vino but any dry white wine will suffice.

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