Ingredients Chefs Use to Make Restaurant Quality Sauces
It's one thing to offer a book full of sauce recipes. It is quite another to open the swinging door to the restaurant kitchen and reveal chefs' secrets for sauce making.
What follows is an explanation of the tricks of the trade - the ingredients, techniques and equipment - that chefs have passed down to their apprentices, and that world class culinary schools now teach their students, that are the keys to making a successful sauce every time.
Consider these secrets a sauce making boot camp. Commit them to memory, or refer to these pages often, and you will be making restaurant quality sauces at home in no time.
How many times have you been to a restaurant, tasted one of their sauces and were struck by the amazing, deep flavor, the texture and/or the way it perfectly complemented the dish? And how many times have you tried to recreate a restaurant dish only to find the sauce somewhat lacking in the flavor or texture department?
Here are ingredients used in top restaurants to ensure flavorful, dimensional sauces, and you can use these secrets to replicate restaurant-quality sauces at home.
Cooking with Alcohol
Very few people enjoy a sauce that tastes heavily of alcohol. Using just a hint of a neutral alcohol such as vodka, though, can bring out flavors that water-based liquids cannot bring out. That's because some compounds are only soluble in alcohol.
It doesn't take much, either. Just a tablespoon or two of alcohol can bring out extra dimensions, especially in tomato-based sauces. (Think vodka sauce for pasta). Of course, there are also many liquors and liqueurs that have pronounced flavors that can be used to enhance sauces by lending more than just alcohol.
While most often thought of for dessert sauces--Chambord or Frangelico in chocolate sauce, Grand Marnier in caramel sauce, etc--berry liqueurs can bring a subtle fruitiness to sauces for lamb, game and pork.
Cooking with Shallots
Using shallots instead of garlic or onion - like garlic and onion, the shallot is a member of the allium family. With a taste somewhere between onion and garlic without any bitterness, shallots are a wonderful addition to a heated sauce or even a cold vinaigrette and are almost always close at hand in restaurant kitchens.
Buy only one or two at a time as they are used more as a seasoning and flavor-building ingredient than as a "bulk" ingredient.
Cooking with Demi-Glace
Demi-glace is one of the chef's secret weapon. Demi-glace is a sauce made by reducing veal stock and sauce espagnole, one of the mother sauces.
The traditional method of making it sometimes requires three days, and the payoff in flavor and texture in sauces that you add it to is tremendous. Most of us don't have the time to make our own demi-glace, however.
Fortunately, there are several good ready-made demi-glace products on the market. Adding just a spoonful or two to your recipe can elevate a ho-hum sauce to one of restaurant quality.
Fresh Ingredients Are Always Better
With the explosion of farmers' markets and gourmet food stores in this country, chefs and home cooks have ready access to more quality, seasonal ingredients than ever before. Let the seasons be your guide when you shop for ingredients, and you will be rewarded with bright, vibrant and fresh flavors.
Learn what sauces complement what foods, and you will be able to serve your family and your guests restaurant-quality meals every time they sit down to your table.
When it come to herbs, chefs know that fresh is almost always better. Many sauce techniques and recipes benefit from the addition of herbs late in the cooking process to add a fresh, green aroma and flavor. In these cases, dried herbs are not a good substitute since they won't have enough time to re-hydrate.
As a general rule of thumb, add dried herbs at the beginning of cooking and stir in only fresh herbs as a flavor accent at the end of cooking and again as a garnish to your finished dish.
Another reason to opt for fresh herbs over dried is that many tender herbs do not carry as much flavor as their fresh counterparts. This is particularly true of basil, parsley, mint and tarragon, all of which are often used in sauce making.
More Ingredients for Great Sauces at Home
Cooking with Flavor Enhancers
One of the differences between restaurant chefs and home cooks is that chefs are familiar with a wide variety of specialty ingredients that can subtly or not-so-subtly enhance a sauce. They understand the diner's palate, the flavors that tongues can taste and the myriad scents that combine with those main tastes to produce complex flavors.
The basic tastes that the human tongue can distinguish are sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Umami is the fifth taste, isolated and defined by Japanese scientists, and can be described as meaty/savory/mouth-watering.
While most of us can think of ways to play up the first four flavors using sweeteners, salts, vinegars and citrus juices, chefs are masters of highlighting the more elusive umami taste using some secret ingredients:
minced sautéed mushrooms add a subtle, meaty flavor to stock and wine-based sauces. Puree the sauce, and your diners won't know that the mushrooms are there, but they'll wonder why your sauce is so amazing.
anchovies or anchovy paste melted into a sauce adds salt and a mouthwatering quality to any sauce that does not read as "fishy" at all.\
fish sauce is a fantastic Japanese flavor enhancer. Add a tablespoon to a pound of ground beef for the best, beefiest-tasting hamburger you've ever eaten. It also adds depth to chicken and turkey stocks. Add a little into almost any savory sauce you can think of to make it as mouthwatering as possible.
tomato paste or ketchup work wonders when added to any tomato or beef-based sauce. The concentrated tomato flavor in each product is loaded full of umami goodness.
Worcestershire sauce is kind of like the Western version of fish sauce. No surprise, it contains anchovies. Use it in brown sauces and tomato-based sauces to enhance flavor.
Secret Thickeners
Cooking With A Roux
A roux is a cooked thickener made by combining equal parts of flour and fat (usually neutral vegetable oil or butter). Depending on how long you cook the two ingredients together, a roux can be anywhere from almost white to a deep mahogany color.
Many of us are familiar with darker roux as flavoring and thickening agents in Cajun and Creole cooking, but white or blond roux is also a classic French thickener.
The cuisines are more alike than you might think: Cajun is short for the French Canadians who left for Louisiana, bringing their flavors and cooking techniques with them.
As a rule of thumb, the lighter the roux, the more thickening power it has while the less flavor it imparts. The darker the roux, the deeper the flavor.
Cooking With A Slurry
A slurry is a very liquid mixture of cold water or other liquid and a starch, usually flour or corn starch. The starch is whisked into the cold liquid until it is smooth and then is poured into a boiling sauce, a little at a time, until the desired thickness is achieved.
Slurries must be made using cold liquid or otherwise the starch will gelatinize on contact with hot liquid, effectively keeping some of the starch from getting wet and resulting in a lumpy sauce.
Once the starch is in solution with a cold liquid (the slurry itself), there is no danger of lumpiness, but the sauce must be kept at a low boil for at least a minute or two to cook out any raw starch flavor.
Reductions
While reduction is primarily a technique, it is a technique that thickens sauces. Simmer or boil a sauce gently until enough water has evaporated leaving what is left in the pan both with concentrated flavor and a syrupy consistency.
Using Starchy Foods
A good way to thicken a sauce without adding additional fat is to cook starchy foods in the sauce (think rice, pasta, potatoes). Sometimes, just the starches that leach out of the foods while cooking are enough to thicken your sauce. If not, you can puree some or all of the straches into the rest of the sauce.
For example, remove a cup or so of the cooked starch and liquid and blend until smooth. Add this puree back to the sauce for additional thickening.
Using Eggs
Egg is used to thicken the classic dessert sauce, creme Anglaise, which is essentially a stirred custard. Egg is also used to thicken savory sauces, most classically allemande sauce, which is a lemony veloute´ sauce thickened with egg and cream.
To use egg to thicken a sauce, the egg must be tempered - slowly brought up to the temperature of the sauce so it won't curdle - before being quickly whisked into the sauce. Sauces thickened in this manner often benefit from straining to make sure that it is completely smooth.
Using Beurre Manie
Beurre Manie is a thickener made by kneading together equal amounts of fat and flour until well homogenized. Since fat coats all the starch granules, you can literally just whisk in little pieces of beurre manie until the sauce is as thick as you want it.
As well, there is less need to boil the sauce (as with a slurry) for a period of time after adding the beurre manie since the fat coating keeps the starch granules from tasting raw.
Don't confuse a beurre manie with roux. Even though both contain the same ingredients, a roux is always cooked and a beurre manie is not.
Using Cream
Adding a little cream to a sauce and letting it reduce a bit adds a richness, subtle thickening and a creamy mouthfeel due to all the butterfat in cream.
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
More Than Gourmet's Demi Glace Gold
Onlinecake.in
Thanks for sharing another awesome recipe as always! Been a long time reader and I found all your recipes wonderful. Tried a few of them as well but not as deliciously looking like yours. Keep up the great work!