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What's NewTHE MOTHER OF ALL MOTHER SAUCES3/14/2005
Very few home cooks make the mother of all mother sauces: the brown sauce anymore. For one, you need lots of time and patience, and two, the kind of forethought that says you are planning for meals a month or two or three down the road. Because its not the mother you eat, its her children, to push the metaphor probably further than it needs to go.
First you need bones, lots of them. At the grocery store they’ll look at you like you have a kennel of dogs at home (we actually do, but they only get one bone a piece, full of marrow, better than gold), and sometimes they even ask if you plan to cook with those, or if they are for the dogs. When you tell them they are for cooking, they look at you like you’re kind of crazy and that’s okay.
Once you have your bones (beef, veal, chicken), you need to roast them for hours, then add them to the biggest pot you can find. Simmer them with onions and carrots and bay leaf, for, get this, 12 hours or so. The one I’m cooking right now has been going for 24. Then you need to strain it and let it sit in the fridge for another 24 until the fat comes up, then you peel that off and put the stock back on the stove. Now you boil the hell out of it until it starts to become almost solid and gelatinous. This is demi-glace. The sad part is that you just spent two days on it and it really doesn’t taste like much. But that’s okay, because again, it’s the children you’re after. You can do two things now. You can cut it into chunks and freeze it. Or you can take some of it and keep reducing it until there is not liquid at all left, and it becomes like caramel, in which case you have a glace de viande or meat glaze. This you let cool and then chop into small pieces. Keep it uncovered in the fridge and it will last forever.
Now you have the base for most of the great French sauces. Reduce red wine and shallots in a pan, add a piece of the demi, some fresh tarragon, a little salt, and, to finish, a pat of butter, and you have a sauce that will make lamb or steak or duck sublime. But that’s hardly the point, I think. The most important thing is you just spent two or three days cooking something that you are not even going to eat then. It’s slow food at its best. You might even call it a lifestyle. Plus, your house will never smell better.
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