How to Make a Pan Sauce in 4 Simple Steps (2024)

FAQs

What are the steps to making pan sauce? ›

Versatile Cooking: Whether it's a velvety chocolate sauce, a vibrant tomato soup, or fluffy mashed potatoes, the saucepan handles it all. Its design is perfect for dishes that require stirring and whisking, offering enough depth to prevent spills and splatters.

The methods for preparing a small sauce from a mother sauce include the sauté and deglaze method, the reduction method, and the gastrique method.

If you don't have stock on hand, use plain old water; the flavor from the fond, aromatics and wine will provide enough oomph for your sauce. Simmer the sauce again over medium and let it reduce about halfway, until your sauce is slightly thickened.

Saucepans are typically deeper and come with a lid. They're ideal for cooking liquids and making sauces, like tomato sauce. Stock pots are even larger than saucepans and are used for cooking large quantities of liquid, such as for soups or stocks.

The five mother sauces are hollandaise, tomato (sauce tomat), bechamel, Espagnole, and veloute. French chef Auguste Escoffier identified the five mother sauces, forever associating them with French cuisine. However, mother sauces are relevant in all modern cooking practices.

There are three basic kinds of ingredients in most sauces: a liquid, a thickening agent, and other flavoring and seasonings.

The most readily available sauce-thickener is flour. For a too-thin sauce, try adding a slurry (equal parts flour and water, whisked together) or beurre manie (equal parts softened butter and flour, kneaded together to form a paste)—both are ideal thickeners for rich and creamy sauces, such as steak sauce recipes.

What are the steps to making a pan sauce? ›

The culinary term fond, French for "base" or "foundation", refers to this sauce. (In the United States, fond may also be used interchangeably with sucs.)

Gravy is just gravy while pan sauces are elegant, clean, smart and flavorful. I've never been one for gravy -- in the worst cases, it's lumpy and tastes of uncooked flour; in the best cases, it's viscous and generic.

They can also be used for simmering and boiling liquids to cook smaller portions of rice, pasta, or vegetables. For larger quantities of pasta or rice, look for a saucepan with a helper handle so it's easier to pour out the liquid into a strainer.

A pan sauce is created similarly when a sautéed protein produces caramelized bits that cling to the pan and the juices rendered from the cooked items, whether they are meat, poultry, or fish. The sauce is completed with reduced wine and aromatics (shallots, mushrooms, garlic, etc.)