Ruhlman's Twenty (30 page)

3
/Toss the peels in decorative sugar.

4
/The finished peels.

A KEY REASON THAT THE FOOD YOU MAKE
at home tastes different from the food you’re served in a decent restaurant is that the restaurant makes its own stock. That’s why stock is called
fond de cuisine,
the “foundation of cooking.” One might also say that the main way a chef’s plate differs from a plate you serve is sauce.

About midway through my culinary school adventures, I began to notice the ubiquity of sauce. Everything, but
everything,
got a sauce. You didn’t even
think
about a dish without a sauce to go with it, whether you were making a canapé, an appetizer, a main course, or a dessert. Even soups got sauced! That’s what the dollop of crème fraîche in a curried butternut soup is: it is the finishing flavor, enriching, smoothing, piquing with its acidity, as well as adding a final visual flourish.

For this reason, “sauce on the side” is a request that drives most chefs bananas. Sauce is a fundamental part of a dish, not an accessory. And that’s how you should think of it. Sauce completes a dish, adding succulence, seasoning, and color to something that, one hopes, is already delicious. That’s how you turn something good into something fantastic.

Sauces at fine-dining restaurants are often based on stocks, and although stock-based sauces are considered by some to be one of the pinnacles of the chef’s craft, they are but one branch of the sauce tree. If you have a little bit of stock, you’re moments away from a delectable sauce. But if you don’t have stock on hand, you don’t need to go sauceless.

Butter is a ready-made sauce that is delicious with roasted chicken and a little Dijon mustard. You can add several different flavors to make it even better
(see Compound Butter).
Cream, the mother of butter, is likewise one step away from being a sauce, whether it is added to a mixture of shallots, peppercorns, and cognac, or to caramelized sugar for a dessert.

Chopped tomato with onion and lime,
salsa crudo,
is a great simple sauce for all kinds of food
(see fish tacos).

There are whole categories of rouxthickened sauces. Stock thickened with roux and milk thickened with roux
(covered in technique #13, Soup)
are categories comprising countless derivative sauces.

Vinaigrettes are such an important kind of sauce that they have their own chapter.

Emulsified sauces such as
Mayonnaise
and
Hollandaise
are oil- and butter-based sauces that are far more easy to make than their reputation suggests.

Puréed vegetables make splendid sauces
(see Sautéed Scallops with Asparagus).
Cooked puréed tomatoes are a terrific all-purpose sauce that goes well beyond the world of pasta; tomato sauce is also an excellent medium for braising, for instance, especially if you don’t have stock. Braises and stews make their own sauce as a by-product of the cooking method. The sauce for the
braised veal breast
is in effect the kind of reduction sauce you get in restaurants— it is meat stock reduced to sauce consistency.

I address the main sauce categories here: cream sauce, emulsified butter sauce, vegetable-based sauce, and tomato sauce.

I focus first on pan sauces, last-minute preparations made in the same pan that the meat cooked in, and on other sauce techniques that don’t require stock or long cooking times. These sauces enhance all kinds of dishes and work like steroids on your cooking muscles. Learning how to produce a last-minute sauce is an invaluable skill, taking advantage of what you are already cooking. With little effort from the cook, they become an elixir that can bring the whole meal together. Making a pan sauce while a roasted chicken rests teaches many lessons in how a pan sauce works.
Water, as discussed in technique #3
, is your main
tool for drawing flavor out of cooked vegetables and browned protein stuck to the pan. Wine, an ally here too, provides instant flavor and acidity, exactly what you want in a sauce. Issues of finesse and tools will tighten your control over cooking sauces, but for the most part, there are only a few basic ideas to understand.

The first is that when you remove meat from the pan, the pan holds some of the flavor that you want to use in the sauce. In the case of this chicken, skin should be stuck to the pan. The skin is largely connective tissue, or protein, and will contribute gelatin that gives your sauce body. The golden brown color of the skin will provide flavor. Juices that the chicken released during cooking will have collected in the pan and turned brown. And there will be fat rendered from the chicken. The pan may also have salt and any other seasonings you put on the bird.

All these elements are ready to go to work for you. If you simply add water, bring it to a boil, and let the mixture cook down a little, you’d have a tasty liquid.

But you can make the sauce much better. First, before you add anything, make sure all the juices have cooked down to a glaze on the pan, that the chicken skin is fully browned, and that the fat is clear, indicating that most of the water has cooked off.

Depending on the size and kind of chicken you roasted, you may not need all the rendered fat. Pour off all but a few tablespoons. This is
schmaltz,
which you can save. It’s tasty, and you can cook with it or use it as the fat in pâte à choux (paht ah SHOO) dough for chicken and dumplings.

Return the pan to the heat, add sliced onion, and cook just to sweat the onion if you’re in a hurry or cook it deeper if you have a little more time. This will give the sweetness of the onion a little more complexity.

Now that you’ve captured the flavors in the pan, add 1 cup/240 milliliters water to make those flavors liquid and catch even more of them. This is often called
deglazing,
lifting the glaze of fat and flavor off the bottom of the pan. Bring the water to a boil. The hot water will immediately begin extracting sugars from the onion and amino acids from the chicken skin. When you cook the water off to make a reduction, the tasty molecules will remain in the pan, browning, getting increasingly flavorful. When the liquid is nearly gone, the fat has begun to crackle, and the onions are browning further, stir the contents of the pan and add another 1 cup/240 milliliters water. Bring the water to a simmer, and you will have a sweet savory sauce for the chicken. You can pour it from the pan onto the chicken, using a spoon to hold back the solids.

Now that we have isolated the key dynamics of the basic pan sauce, we can begin to bring even more flavor to it.

• Instead of using water for the first deglazing, use white wine.
  
• Do a third deglazing and reduction.
  
• Finish the sauce with some acidity: a shot of red wine or sherry vinegar or a squeeze of lemon juice.
  
• Stir in a couple of teaspoons of fish sauce for umami.
  
• Add aromatic ingredients: fresh herbs such as parsley, tarragon, or chives, or a tablespoon of minced
  Lemon Confit
  .
  
• Add a variety of aromatics to the hot fat along with the sliced onion. Using a vegetable peeler, cut a carrot into thin strips, for faster flavor extraction, and add to the onion. Add a smashed garlic clove or two; cracked peppercorns; a bay leaf or some thyme; and a teaspoon of tomato paste/purée. (If you do this, you’re making a mini batch of your own chicken stock!)
  
• Include chicken parts, such as the wing tips, neck, gizzard, and heart (not the liver), either before roasting the chicken or before the first deglazing.
  

Soon all of the preceding will be too easy for you, and you’ll want to make the sauce even better. After the final deglazing, pass the sauce through a fine-mesh strainer into a small saucepan. Now you have a very fine sauce, and you can refine it further. Swirl in some butter to enrich it and give it a voluptuous texture. Sweat a little minced shallot in the saucepan before you strain the sauce into it. Adjust the consistency with a couple of teaspoons of
beurre manié
or a cornstarch/cornflour slurry. Stir in some finely minced herbs—fines herbes are a common and delicious pairing: parsley, tarragon, chervil, and chives. Taste your sauce again for seasoning and acidity.

Once you do this, you’ll see that the technique works for any meat that leaves some of its browned protein and fat in the pan. Home cooks are often led to believe that in order to make great meat-based sauces, they must spend weekends laboring over enormous pots of stock and vats of steaming bones and, afterward, a piled-high sink. Not true: Some water and a pan in which you cooked meat are all you need.

A traditional hollandaise sauce is a preparation to revel in, not to fear. Like mayonnaise, hollandaise is an emulsified sauce—lots of butter emulsified into a small amount of liquid with the help of some enriching egg yolk. Many recipes use only lemon juice for flavor, but a vinegar reduction is included in the version described by Escoffier, and adds some complexity to the end flavor.

A reduction is basically a mini stock that you quickly prepare before making the sauce by combining vinegar and aromatics, cooking off the vinegar, and then reconstituting it with water.

Vegetable-based sauces are great as well. You can quickly sauté chopped mushrooms and shallots, season them with salt and pepper, deglaze the pan with white wine, and add just enough water to bring all the ingredients together. Finish with a pat of butter, and you’ve got a delicious sauce for white fish such as halibut, sautéed chicken, or grilled/barbecued meats. Add a squeeze of lemon or a pinch of curry for a tantalizing accent.

Tomato sauce is not only an excellent all-purpose sauce—it’s also a great cooking medium. I suspect it’s not prepared nearly enough at home because of the heavy marketing of tomato-sauce makers. You can’t make tomato sauce at the last minute—the fastest you can bring it together is about an hour—but tomato sauce is simple and practically cooks itself once the ingredients are in the pan. It’s little more than puréed tomatoes cooked down. You can flavor it, you can enrich it, and you can make it more complex in any number of ways.

My favorite tomato sauce is simply plum tomatoes (also known as Roma tomatoes), onion, and butter. This results in a very fresh-tasting sauce that is equally fine on pasta or as a braising liquid for pot roast. If I want more complexity, I char the tomatoes under a broiler/grill. For the recipe in this section, you can roast them in a hot oven for 20 minutes. They could be grilled/barbecued first for a smoky tomato sauce. In winter, when good fresh tomatoes are scarce, I use canned whole tomatoes (I prefer Muir Glen organic tomatoes and San Marzano tomatoes).

When flavoring the sauce with hard herbs (herbs with tough stems), such as oregano or marjoram, add them at the beginning (tie them in a bunch with kitchen string to make them easy to remove later). When using soft herbs, such as basil, add them just before serving to keep their flavor vivid and fresh (the flavor will be lost if you cook them).

The following recipes are examples of how quickly sauces can come together. With one exception, the following sauces don’t rely on stock.