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Sauce

Demi-glace Sauce

A reduced sauce made from Espagnole sauce and gravy, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,303 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Demi-glace Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and reduce

  1. Prepare the Espagnole sauce as directed.

  2. Boil the sauce until well reduced.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the gravy and simmer for about 10 minutes.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Espagnole sauce
Provides the thickened brown base and most of the body of the sauce.
Good gravy
Adds meaty savour and extra liquid, loosening the reduced base and deepening its flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce until well reduced. Reducing concentrates the flavour and thickens the sauce by evaporating water. If it is under-reduced the sauce stays thin and bland, and if it is over-reduced it can become too salty and sticky once the gravy is added.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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