How To Make A Demi Glace

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Demi-glace is a thick and intensely flavored brown liquid that is both a sauce itself, and -- equally information technology is more than often used -- a sauce base. There are many differing opinions on the ingredients and methods for making demi-glace, but typically all these recipes use a combination of a heavily reduced meat stock that is often flavored with tabular array vino or Madeira. Oftentimes prized as a flavorful thickener for savory sauces and for calculation a rich, hearty depth to finished dishes, demi-glace is likewise great at deglazing a pan.

Stand-Alone Sauce

Demi-glace has a wonderfully rich and intensely meaty season, and can stand up alone equally a sauce. Dishes with stiff savory flavors tend to hold up best to -- and complement -- stand-alone demi-glace. Consider serving information technology with rich, compact dishes like prime rib of beef, whole roasted leg of lamb and roasts of game like venison, elk, moose, bear or kangaroo.

Deglazing a Pan

Another fashion to use demi-slippery is to deglaze cooking pans. Deglazing refers to the technique of pouring liquid into a hot pan to loosen up the intensely-flavored "brown bits" left over in a pan after cooking meat, which can easily be reduced into a pan sauce. Pan sauces are generally very simple sauces to make equally they typically involve nothing more than than whisking the brown bits into the deglazing liquid in the pan and reducing the liquid for a few minutes until thickened to a sauce consistency. One benefit of using demi-glace to deglaze a pan is that since demi-glace is already very thick itself, the pan sauce does non need to thicken in the pan for very long at all. However, demi-glace is oftentimes likewise thick to be used equally a deglazing liquid by itself. Rather, demi-glace is often added to the pan along with other flavorful liquids to make a rich and pan sauce. Demi-slippery, along with brandy, port or carmine wine, make an first-class pan sauce to serve with beef and bison steaks, lamb chops and ostrich filets. Archetype French dishes using this technique include Steak Diane and Steak Au Poivrade.

Compound Sauces

Demi-glace is very often used as a sauce base, rather than a stand up-alone sauce itself. Called past Julia Child "the traditional mother of the brownish sauces," demi-slippery both flavors and thickens many classical French sauces including Sauce Bordelaise -- a reddish vino sauce typically flavored with shallot, thyme and sometimes os marrow -- and Sauce Robert -- a white wine and mustard sauce oftentimes flavored with chopped onion and sometimes pepper and vinegar.

Storing and Reusing Demi-Glace

Making traditional demi-glace can be a very fourth dimension consuming process, so many chefs adopt to make a large corporeality at one time -- the reasoning being that the effort involved in making doesn't change much regardless of how much the chef chooses to brand. Demi-slippery will keep in your refrigerator for about two weeks. It can also exist frozen for upwards to six months. One way to freeze demi-glace for easy later use is to pour the finished -- and cooled -- sauce into ice trays and freeze them. Then remove the demi-glace "ice cubes" from the ice trays and store in freezer bags in your freezer. The frozen cubes can then be dropped into sauces and recipes as needed from your freezer.