If you have spent any time on my web site, you know I am a huge fan of preparing sauces…pan sauces, classic French style sauce and everyday simple sauces. As Fernand Point, the man considered to be the father of modern French cuisine said, “It is the sauce that distinguishes a good chef. The Saucier is a soloist in the orchestra of a great kitchen.”

Now that may be taking it a bit far, but I do believe if you know how to prepare sauces, you can turn an ordinary sautéed chicken breast into something special. Same with a pork chop and even a steak that can usually stand on its own. See my Steak with Wild Mushroom Sauce or Grilled Steak with Peppercorn Sauce.

The trick to making great sauces at home is having the right ingredients. The reason professional chefs can serve you an incredible rich, velvety brown sauce in your favorite restaurant is because they have spent hours, sometimes days preparing stock reductions and demi-glaces.

Most of us home cooks don’t have the time or the desire to put the time and effort into making classic stock reductions for soups, stews, braises and sauces. Sure, we have no trouble making a batch of chicken stock for homemade chicken soup but how many of you want to spend two days making a demi-glace? Not me.

Good News For Home Cooks

Good news for us is there are now companies making some very good commercial stock reduction products that we can use to make great sauces in our own kitchens. Some are better than others and it’s my goal this year to try as many products as I can find and give them a taste test.

In the meantime, my current favorite commercial brand is More Than Gourmet’s Demi Glace Gold and any of their other classic stock reductions that include chicken, fish, lobster, veggie, duck, veal and a few others. I have been using these products for years and I can honestly say these products have elevated my cooking more than any other line of products. I can now make the same sauces that I’ve enjoyed in many of the fine restaurants I’ve been fortunate to dine at.

 Now I’m not saying there aren’t better products on the market. I’m sure there are cheaper brands but most of those are pure chemicals and not using all natural products. If there is a brand you recommend me trying, please let me know and I will give it a go.

If you want to learn more about making sauces at home and read more about these products, I suggest you go to www.gatewaygourmet.com. There you will find dozens of sauce recipes, many of them featuring More Than Gourmet’s products, plus ingredient breakdowns and where to purchase them.

Who Said The Holidays Are Over?

Better yet, one of those sources is now offering the entire More Than Gourmet product line at 20% off.  This is an incredible opportunity to try these products and start making restaurant quality sauces in your own kitchen. But you’ll want to hurry because the sale ends this Sunday, January 7, 2007.

So go over to GatewayGourmet.com and take a look at these products and their recipes and if you like what you see, take advantage of the sale going on at ClubSauce.  The sale ends on Sunday and I don’t think you’ll find prices like these anywhere.

My youngest daughter who is just 6 years old has to do a report at school on what’s her favorite food. Most of the kids are reporting on macaroni and cheese, pizza, pasta with butter but Maddie is going to talk about filet mignon with demi glace sauce. Yeah, one of the oddities of being the Reluctant Gourmet’s daughter.

Not that Maddie is an adventurous eater, especially when it comes to meats (she doesn’t even like hamburgers) but for some strange, unexplainable reason she loves steak, especially filet mignon with a rich brown sauce I make with demi-glace.

If you have spent any time on my web site, you will see I love to make sauces for beef, sauces for chicken, sauces for fish, hey, I just like to make sauces. I really believe anyone can learn how to sauté a chicken breast or grill up a strip steak, but if you want to serve your family and friends a meal that’s going to really “wow” them, you need to serve it with a rich, lush, delicious sauce.

Whether it’s using my 5 Step Method for Preparing Quality Brown Sauces or Making an Incredible Pan Sauce, you need to start with the right ingredients. Most of the ingredients you already have at home including butter, shallots (or onion), red wine, some fresh or dried herbs (fresh are better) depending on the sauce you are making but the one ingredient you most likely don’t have is demi-glace.

Why? Because real demi-glace is a pain to make at home. You need pounds of veal and beef bones and you better have a lot of time on your hands reducing the brown stock to a glace with burning it. This is why professional chefs are always reducing stocks in their kitchens so they always have demi and other stock reductions on hand to prepare those rich, velvety sauces.

Restaurant Quality Demi Glace is Available

There are a few commercial demi-glace products on the market. Williams Sonoma has a demi-glace, but they also have a Marsala sauce that is prepared from demi-glace that is pretty good.

The product I like the best and has elevated my cooking the most of any commercial product on the market is Demi Glace Gold. I met the owners of the company who makes this stuff years ago at a Food Trade Show in New York and have not stopped using their product since.

This product is amazing. So amazing, I can now make restaurant quality sauces in less than 20 minutes that are as good as any that I’ve been served in some very good restaurants. Check out my Grilled Steak with Peppercorn Sauce or Wild Mushroom Sauce. And if you ever thought about making a classic, restaurant quality Marsala Sauce, you’ll need demi-glace.

If you are interested in learning more about Demi Glace Gold and the complete line of More Than Gourmet products, I suggest you go to http://www.gatewaygourmet.com/. There you can read all about these products, what’s in them and how to use them. They also have a large selection of recipes featuring these products and an eCookbook that I helped write called, How to Make Restaurant Quality Sauces at Home…in 20 minutes or less.

If you want to buy Demi Glace Gold, I suggest you go to ClubSauce.com. Not only do they have the best prices on the Internet, they have the complete selection of More Than Gourmet products.

This is a great product. One you should check out for yourself.

I received an email from Jason who tried my recipe for Sautéed Chicken with Garlic and Shallots and was having some problems.

He said, “ the chicken breasts are taking nearly twice as long to cook through! I’m following the recipe exactly, using a fairly thick pan and pre-heating it well in advance.

The outside ends up charring pretty badly. Could it be the type of chicken breasts I am buying? I get the store brand packs, which are cheaper, but the breasts seem to be thicker than other known brands.”

After looking at the recipe again, I had some ideas on this problem but I wanted an expert’s view so I emailed Chef Adam Bickel for his take on this situation. Together we came up with some probable causes and a few solutions.

Even though we are talking about sautéing chicken breasts, these cooking tips hold true for sautéing chicken, beef, lamb, fish or whatever you are cooking.

Our first thought was to just turn down the heat to medium-high. Some recipes you find in cookbooks and on the Internet are written by professionals who sometimes forget that we don’t have the same skills as they do.

In a restaurant, professional chefs need to cook fast so they often have the burners cranked up to high but they have sautéed thousands of chicken breasts this way and are comfortable with the heat. Another chef friend of mine, Chef Ricco DeLuca, has to recalculate recipes as far as timing and burner heat to match my skills compared to his own. Otherwise, I end up burning everything.

So whenever you look at any recipe, you have to know who the writer is writing for and allow some leeway when it comes to cooking times and cooking temperatures. Looking back at the Sautéed Chicken with Garlic and Shallots recipe, I realize I have to change it some to make it easier for home cooks.  I don’t think anybody should be sautéing on the highest heat level unless they have a lot of experience. Just too many things that can go wrong.

Cooking Equipment

It’s important to understand that everyone’s cooking equipment is different and any recipe that provides exact times and heat will vary depending on that equipment.

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