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Pan reduction sauces


cjsadler

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In trying to improve my cooking skills over the past few months, I've found that there's a ton of bad advice and poor instruction in cookbooks (I guess I shouldn't have been all that surprised). Lately, I've been trying some pan reduction sauces (following sauteing) and have been having a hell of a time thickening them without reaching for the cornstarch. A typical recipe tells you to deglaze with wine, reduce, add stock, reduce, and then finish with a Tbs or two of butter. But I find that even after reducing to the point of nothing, it's still a watery sauce (not surprising, as the wine and stock were mostly water to begin with). So far, I've picked up the following key tricks, which I have yet to test:

1. No dummy, they mean to add already reduced chicken stock (why does no recipe or book ever say this!)

2. When finishing with butter, take the pan off the heat and shake in chunks of cold butter... which in essence, cools and thickens the sauce (there is an interesting discussion of this on EGullet in reference to an Eric Ripert recipe-- I can't seem to find it right now, though)

Any other advice?

Thanks,

Chris

PS-- This would make a great eGCI topic!

Chris Sadler

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I think the cold butter is key. I recall that you don't want to add butter to boiling sauce. It will break it down and lose its emulsifying/thickening ability.

Whole milk works also, but not was well as cream.

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I have seen a technique where several empty pans are heated and the liquid is transferred between each one, causing a rapid reduction. I have heard this works, but have only done it with a couple of pans (harder to accomplish in a home kitchen). Can anyone verify this?

"If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony."

~ Fernand Point

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I have seen a technique where several empty pans are heated and the liquid is transferred between each one, causing a rapid reduction.  I have heard this works, but have only done it with a couple of pans (harder to accomplish in a home kitchen).  Can anyone verify this?

I've heard of it but never done it. After de-glazing shouldn't the sauce just thicken by itself according to the amount of time it simmers?

I've never had a problem with this...

Iris

GROWWWWWLLLLL!!

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PS-- This would make a great eGCI topic!

I'm writing it now.

What would you like emphasised?

Traditionally you reduce the liquid you add by about half, then mount with butter - essentially you are making a sort of beurre blanc or brun. Maybe you are not adding enough butter? Its different from finishing an already thick sauce with a knob of butter. You need about twice the amount of butter to liquid in the pan you are adding it to.

Beurre manie (butter mashed up with flour) may be your secret weapon.

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Beurre manie is cool, but you have to be careful with it. If you cook it more than very briefly it takes on a raw-flour taste, and it's easy to overdo it, whereas if you put in a little too much plain butter, what's the harm?

Matthew Amster-Burton, aka "mamster"

Author, Hungry Monkey, coming in May

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PS-- This would make a great eGCI topic!

I'm writing it now.

What would you like emphasised?

Traditionally you reduce the liquid you add by about half, then mount with butter - essentially you are making a sort of beurre blanc or brun. Maybe you are not adding enough butter? Its different from finishing an already thick sauce with a knob of butter. You need about twice the amount of butter to liquid in the pan you are adding it to.

Beurre manie (butter mashed up with flour) may be your secret weapon.

Jack-- that's excellent, thanks! (been really enjoying your eCGI contributions thus far). I'd really like to see a step-by-step of a basic reduction sauce that needs thickening without starch/flour..... so of maybe only wine, stock and butter (with shallots, herbs, whatever). And perhaps a demonstration of an already thick sauce (forgive my ignorance here, but I'm not sure what an example of this is-- most the sauces I've been doing are liquid that seems to boil away to nothing, as mentioned in my previous post).

I am not adding nearly enough butter going by your ratio, so I imagine that's a big part of my problem (I guess recipes don't want to scare you).

Chris

Chris Sadler

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PS-- This would make a great eGCI topic!

I'm writing it now.

Whoo-hoo! I thought I missed it for sure. I am looking forward to it.

I enjoyed your "Cream Sauces" class. It's nice knowing that when I was growing up I was eating a "real" cheese sauce based upon the Béchamel ("Hey, Mom WAS a good cook afterall!").

And thanks for mentioning the brown sauces in your lesson. I haven't gone through the Stock class yet and so I missed the "Stock Based Sauces" class, as well. Guess I have some catching up to do!

 

“Peter: Oh my god, Brian, there's a message in my Alphabits. It says, 'Oooooo.'

Brian: Peter, those are Cheerios.”

– From Fox TV’s “Family Guy”

 

Tim Oliver

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I like a mixture of wine and stock, but I don't start w/ reduced stock. Like Suzanne, I just keep boiling it until it is almost dry. Unlike Suzanne, I often slip in a little creme fraiche or butter at the end. The finished sauce isn't as thick as cafeteria gravy, of course, but I wouldn't describe it as watery. Mine has the consistency of heavy cream.

The meat is better if it rests a bit anyway. Just turn that pan up to high and be patient. It WILL boil all the way to dry if you leave it long enough-I know this from experience!

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I have seen a technique where several empty pans are heated and the liquid is transferred between each one, causing a rapid reduction. I have heard this works, but have only done it with a couple of pans (harder to accomplish in a home kitchen). Can anyone verify this?

I used this technique alot when I was a pasta cook. If the pasta was perfect, but the sauce was still too runny, I would flip it into three hot pans in a row. By the third pan it was perfect. Mount with a dab of butter and your on your way. Great trick on a busy night.

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Given the restrictions on the home cook, the solution I found was to reduce all of my stocks down to glace (a gallon of stock = 1 or 2 cups of glace). That way sauce consistency was much easier to control. You can always add more liquid if you want to steep some herbs or loosen it up - or even expand it into stock for a soup or risotto. But when you have a few pans on the boil, I found it difficult and a bit annoying to judge the reduction of a stock to sauce consistency - even more so, given the weak nature of most home cookers (who has three pans, or three more burners at home, to do that trick?).

Also, it means I can store a few gallons of stock at a time, taking up only a few cups of space in my freezer.

As Pepin says, you have to be careful in the last hour or so of reduction, or you can burn your stock (Impossible, I thought, until I did it).

It also means that you have to take all the more time and care over your stocks, but that's always the fun part.

And at the end, mounting with butter becomes a simpler operation too - you just get a sense for how concentrated the glace is, how much gelatin there is for body, salt etc. and what you need to do to make it into a sauce. It's like a culinary magnifying glass for any other flavours you add.

"Gimme a pig's foot, and a bottle of beer..." Bessie Smith

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"111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321" Bruce Frigard 'Winesonoma' - RIP

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As Pepin says, you have to be careful in the last hour or so of reduction, or you can burn your stock (Impossible, I thought, until I did it).

one late night finishing a stock, being tired i thought i might as well pour it into a big frying pan to have a faster reduction. sat down on a chair in the kitchen, fell asleep, and woke up coughing, to smoke all over the place - and a ruined pan.

anyway, it's a good idea to reduce to glace. you just have to stay awake.

christianh@geol.ku.dk. just in case.

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I think the cold butter is key.  I recall that you don't want to add butter to boiling sauce.  It will break it down and lose its emulsifying/thickening ability.

Whole milk works also, but not was well as cream.

You have to be careful with the origin of the recipe when dealing with beurre blanc and thickening sauces with butter. The water content in butter is different in the USA from Canada, Mexico, Japan, Europe and Australia.

Most butter in North America (salted) is frozen butter from grade 'b' stock. After salting they can classify it as salted grade 'a' salted butter.

Your best bet is to buy only unsalted butter for cooking to have a consistent base to start with. Have your reduced stock at a minimal simmer and wisk (with a Wisk!) the butter in slowly until you reach your desired thickness (and always weigh, not measure your butter).

Chef/Owner/Teacher

Website: Chef Fowke dot com

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Temperature is critical for beurre blanc. It should only be warm. The cold butter cools the liquid rapidly

For butter emuslison sauces (which are different) you need an emulsifier, such as the gelatine in the pan residues, and boil fast to amalgamate.

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cj doesn't mention what sort of pan he uses. Would a nonstick pan impede a successful reduction, perhaps?

I don't use them to saute so have no personal experience with them. I have read, however, that they are not good at creating a satisfactory fond. Would that influence results?

"Half of cooking is thinking about cooking." ---Michael Roberts

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While gelatin is a useful emulsifier, and can facilitate reduction sauces, the real powerhouse in any sauce involving butter is lecithin, which is abundant in both egg yolks (think mayonnaise and hollandaise) and butter (also hollandaise, though the amount of lecithin in an egg yolk overshadows the amount in butter).

In The Curious Cook, Harold McGee describes making a butter sauce (meaning beurre blanc or an enriched reduction of pan juices) as the act of turning butter back into cream. The real key is temperature. If you maintain the contents of your pan between 100 F and 130 F, you can whisk all the butter you want into the reduction, be it wine and herbs or meat stock. You don't need to invoke superstition or arcane techniques like shaking, swirling or swinging a live chicken over your head. If I recall correctly (I don't have the book in front of me), he even demonstrates it with plain old water.

Dave Scantland
Executive director
dscantland@eGstaff.org
eG Ethics signatory

Eat more chicken skin.

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You don't need to invoke superstition or arcane techniques like shaking, swirling or swinging a live chicken over your head.

Man... my pet chicken is going to be really glad to hear that!

But I'll bet the ferrets will be disappointed! A dizzy chicken is easier to dispatch.

Dave Scantland
Executive director
dscantland@eGstaff.org
eG Ethics signatory

Eat more chicken skin.

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In The Curious Cook, Harold McGee describes making a butter sauce (meaning beurre blanc or an enriched reduction of pan juices) as the act of turning butter back into cream. The real key is temperature. If you maintain the contents of your pan between 100 F and 130 F, you can whisk all the butter you want into the reduction, be it wine and herbs or meat stock. You don't need to invoke superstition or arcane techniques like shaking, swirling or swinging a live chicken over your head. If I recall correctly (I don't have the book in front of me), he even demonstrates it with plain old water.

The French Laundry Cookbook has a page on beurre monte (p135). You take a tbs of water, heat it a little, and whisk in a tbs of cold butter. You then add as much butter as you want, and as long as the temp stays below 190 degrees (interesting that Keller differs from McGee by so many degrees), the butter is a lovely, emulsified whole, and does not separate. I like this with steamed artichokes, but Keller talks about using for everything from poaching to holding cooked meat (!) to finishing sauces.

Is this emulsification the same thing that happens when you finish a pan sauce with butter? I guess you would need to cool the pan sauce and keep it at a low temp while adding the butter.

What about the amount of fond? I would guess the end product would have more body, as well as more flavor, if the balance between liquid and fond was correct, as Suzanne F suggests.

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The French Laundry Cookbook has a page on beurre monte (p135). .. but Keller talks about using for everything from poaching to holding cooked meat (!) to finishing sauces.

(Forgive the off-topic-ness of this, but) Has anyone actually rested meat in beurre monte? What do you do - throw it in a bucket? Leave a thread hanging over the side like some meat tea-bag?

"Gimme a pig's foot, and a bottle of beer..." Bessie Smith

Flickr Food

"111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321" Bruce Frigard 'Winesonoma' - RIP

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Is this emulsification the same thing that happens when you finish a pan sauce with butter?  I guess you would need to cool the pan sauce and keep it at a low temp while adding the butter.

No, they are two different sauces.

The low temperature beurre monte is close to a beurre blanc, basically flavoured whipped melted butter, using the emulsion that is already in the butter. Keller talks about 4 tablespoons of water to a pound of butter

A traditional pan sauce is boiled rapidly, and the agitation, together with the gelatine in the pan residues, emulsifies the comparatively small amount of butter into the liquid.

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cj doesn't mention what sort of pan he uses. Would a nonstick pan impede a successful reduction, perhaps?

I don't use them to saute so have no personal experience with them. I have read, however, that they are not good at creating a satisfactory fond. Would that influence results?

There's nothing in the pan to deglaze if you're using a nonstick pan, is there?

Robert Buxbaum

WorldTable

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