Restaurant Quality Red Shallot Sauce
This red wine shallot sauce is easy to make at home with just a few simple ingredients. Shallots are a member of the onion family and are thought to have originated in Palestine. Shallots can be utilized like any other onion.
Their flavor is more delicate, sweeter and complex than a standard onion. They excel in sauces, salad dressings, and when a touch of minced, raw onion is called for in a recipe.
Cooking with Red Wine
In most of the sauce recipes on my site, there will be a call for red wine, port or some other spirit to deglaze the ingredients or add flavor to the sauce. In my opinion, it is important you cook with wines good enough to drink.
You don't want to buy a cheap wine or worse yet, one of those fake non alcoholic wines you can find at the grocery store when making great sauces. You don't want to ruin a $18 per pound steak by serving it with a sauce make from cheap wine.
Saying this, if you cannot consume any type of alcoholic beverages, of course by all means find an alternative.
Shallots
Demi Glace
As with many of the great French sauces, you'll see demi glace as one of the important ingredients. Demi glace is basically a reduction of beef or veal stock with a few other ingredients.
It is very time consuming to prepare at home or in a restaurant with limited staff but this should not stop you from making great sauces for your family. Below the recipe there are some examples of quality commercial demi glace now available to home cooks.
Red Wine Shallot Sauce
Equipment
- Sauce pan
Ingredients
- 2 shallots minced
- 4 tablespoons butter unsalted, divided
- 1 cup red wine
- 3 sprigs fresh thyme
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 tablespoon whole peppercorns
- 1 cup demi glace
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- In a medium sized saucepan, sauté the shallots in 1 tablespoon of the butter until translucent.
- Add the wine, thyme, bay leaf and peppercorns and reduce to about ½ cup.
- Add the demi glace and again reduce to ½ cup.
- Strain the sauce into a small saucepan. (Optional)
- Over low heat, slowly add the remaining butter 1 tablespoon at a time using a whisk to incorporate.
- Reduce until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
- Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.
My Top Choices for Demi Glace
Online Sources: Demi Glace
For those of you who do not want to make demi glace at home.
Demi glace is the most important ingredient for making classic "restaurant quality" brown sauces. All the great French brown sauces use demi glace. But it can also be used in soups, stews and braises. It's something you can make at home but it takes a long, long time to do it right and if you make one mistake, it can easily be ruined. Lucky for us, there are now some great sources for commercial grade demi glace and I want to share a few with you now. Everyone has their preferences so I suggest you give each a try to find out which product you like best.Savory Choice's Demi Glace
Ready in minutes, Savory Choice beef demi glace allows home chefs to deliver impressive restaurant-quality meals quickly and cost-effectively. Professional chefs typically take at least 24 hours to prepare this traditional reduction sauce by simmering stock, vegetables, wine and spices to a velvety consistency.More Than Gourmet's Demi Glace Gold
One of my first commercial demi glace products and still one of my favorites. For almost 25 years, More Than Gourmet has been the gold standard for flavor and quality when it comes to sauces, stock, and soup. This product comes in 1 pound tubs and 1.5 ounce pucks and even bigger sizes if you are a commercial establishment. I like buying 6 of the pucks at a time unless I'm doing a big party and need the pounder.
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