Veloute and Hollandaise. They can be used as a base for preparing more complex sauces or a proven dressing for a dish. Demi-glace goes especially well with meat dishes. In French restaurants it is served by default with most meat plates. But the use of sauce is not limited to juicy steaks. It also “works” organically when paired with fish, vegetables or eggs. The chef can vary the composition of the demi-glace or choose special food processing techniques. It all depends on the characteristics of the dish, its components, the imagination of the cook or the personal wishes of the client.
General characteristics of the product
Demi-glace is one of the basic sauces of French cuisine. It is prepared using beef bones, seasonings and vegetables. All products except beef bones are subject to variation. A chef or an ordinary consumer may prefer red or white wine, bell peppers or tomatoes, root or tarragon. The set of products for a traditional demi-glace looks like this: red wine, allspice and, parsley root, onions of 3 varieties (, and), beef bones. For authentic taste, we recommend going to high-quality French restaurants, but you can come up with new bright variations in your own kitchen.
Preparing demi-glace can take a whole day, provided that you strictly follow the recipe and want to bring the sauce to the desired taste and consistency. To make life easier for the average consumer, large industrial companies began to produce packaged dry demi-glace mixtures, which simply need to be diluted with liquid or lightly stewed. If you decide to purchase such a sauce substitute, then carefully read the composition. It should not contain unnecessary ingredients, flavor enhancers and other achievements of the gastronomic industry. Agree, going to a French restaurant will cost less than treating the gastrointestinal tract after poor-quality food.
The final taste of the sauce directly depends on the quality of the selected products. Don't skimp on fresh beef bones and, whenever possible, use fresh herbs and spices instead of dry ones. This will give the demi-glace a special charm and an unimaginable palette of shades.
Historical reference
It is no coincidence that demi-glace has gained the status of a “legendary sauce” in the gastronomic world. The unique recipe appeared in the Middle Ages. Chefs of that time tried to experiment with familiar tastes and make their name in culinary history. Sauces have become a real battleground for gastronomic titans. Almost every French sauce quickly gained popularity and quickly became a world heritage item.
Brief etymological note: translated from French, demi-glace sounds like “half ice.”
The sauce gained popularity thanks to the 19th century cook and gourmet Antonin Careme. It was he who decided to revive authentic French cuisine and slightly update traditional sauce recipes. For almost two centuries, all of Europe used Asian spices and herbs. Karem decided to distort the situation and called on all chefs to go back to their roots. On this wave of popularity, demi-glace rose, capturing not only France, but the whole world.
The sauce was included in the list of 8 mother sauces, received a new interpretation and still does not give up its leading position.
Chemical composition of the product
Use of the component in cooking
Demi-glace is classified as a “meat sauce,” although this statement is very vague. The component really goes harmoniously with all types of meat, regardless of the degree of fat content and flavor palette, but also works well paired with vegetable stews, grain or legume dishes. Moreover, demi-glace is an excellent base for other, more complex sauces.
Forget about bias, taste the true taste of demi-glace and determine your own ideal combinations. Some will be delighted with the French sauce and pumpkin puree, while others are ready to indulge in demi-glace all day long. It's just a matter of taste, and there's no arguing about tastes. To experience French cuisine, you need to develop that same taste - to distinguish between basic combinations, to understand the concept of interaction of certain components. The main thing is to understand the system and learn to perceive taste not only as a whole, but also as a large-scale gastronomic mechanism.
Demi-glace sauce recipe
The traditional demi-glace recipe requires titanic efforts and a colossal amount of time. If you are a culinary beginner, then practice making less complex French sauces, for example, bechamel, vinaigrette or veloute with chicken broth. Cooking demi-glace will take 12 hours of your life, and all cookbooks indicate the degree of difficulty of cooking as 5/5.
We will need:
- beef bones – 1 kg;
- white wine – 500 ml;
- vegetable oil – 200 ml;
- onion – 150 g;
- carrots – 150 g;
- celery root – 150 g;
- celery stalk – 100 g;
- garlic – 100 g;
- fresh tomatoes – 100 g;
- leek – 100 g;
- filtered water – 50 ml;
- tomato paste (you can simply puree the peeled tomatoes in a blender) – 30 g;
- bay leaf – 2 g;
- allspice – 2 g;
- black peppercorns – 1 g.
Preparation
Chop the beef bones into small pieces. Chop carrots, onions into small cubes, then fry in a frying pan (with a drop of vegetable oil for frying) for 5 minutes. The vegetables should become soft and have a light golden hue. Chop the tomatoes into small cubes and add to the pan. After adding the tomatoes, leave the mixture to simmer for 10-15 minutes.
While the vegetable mixture is preparing, take care of the beef bones. Preheat the oven to 180°C and place the bones there for 30-40 minutes. As soon as the product changes color from gray to golden, remove from the oven. Prepared beef bones should be immediately mixed with processed vegetables.
Place the mixture of bones and vegetables in a deep saucepan or saucepan, then pour in white wine, place over medium heat and simmer lightly for 1-3 minutes. During this time, the alcohol should evaporate, and all components of the dish will be saturated with flavor and aroma. Pour in a small amount of filtered liquid, add bay leaf, pepper, favorite spices and leave the saucepan to simmer over low heat for about 6-8 hours. It is important that the bones do not burn to the bottom, so stir the contents periodically. After the required period has passed, remove the saucepan from the heat and strain the sauce through a sieve into a clean pan. Place the filtered sauce back on low heat and cook for another 3-4 hours. As soon as the mass thickens and acquires a dense consistency, remove the pan from the heat and serve the desired demi-glace to the table.
Why traditional recipes can and should be changed
The age of demi-glace has already exceeded several hundred years. During this time, the gastronomic industry has significantly modernized, eating habits have changed dramatically, and the population is increasingly thinking about their own health rather than about tastes and combinations.
Of course, authentic dishes and recipes have a place in the modern gastronomic industry, but they are not in wide demand and are aimed at a specific limited audience.
Cooking, like other areas of life, must be generational. We can no longer afford overly fatty beef broths and vegetables fried in vegetable oil. Moreover, few people would agree to spend 12 hours at the stove to prepare an exquisite French sauce.
We ourselves have put everything on the conveyor belt (including the pace of life), so we can be distracted extremely rarely and on special occasions.
Don't forget that experiments are almost always good. Find your true identity in cooking. Once you realize that you are dusting off old recipe tomes, you will notice that you are losing touch with the present. Feel free to swap frying for braising, beef bones for vegetable or fish broth, and create your own sauce. Perhaps it will turn out like in the movies - when a young hooligan chef takes up experiments, thereby attracting a new audience and writing an absolutely amazing gastronomic story that can conquer the world.
Demi-glace sauce is an invention of French chefs. Essentially, it is a broth concentrate made from beef (rarely other) bones, supplemented with vegetables, tomato and spices. This is an excellent base for other delicious sauces for meat and fish, as well as an indispensable addition to many first courses and side dishes.
To prepare the Demi-glace sauce, you will need to be patient and devote the lion's share of your time to this, since this process is quite lengthy, although low-cost.
Demi-glace sauce - recipe
Ingredients:- beef bones – 4.2 kg;
- celery (stems) – 400 g;
- carrots – 700 g;
- onions – 700 g;
- garlic cloves – 4-5 pcs.;
- – 155 g;
- sunflower or olive oil without aroma – 100 ml;
- dry red wine – 500 ml;
- rock salt - to taste;
- freshly ground pepper - to taste.
Preparation
Typically, beef bones and limbs are used to make the sauce. They must be washed, carefully placed on a baking sheet and baked at 200 degrees until they acquire an intense and rich golden color. We now place the burnt bones in a large ten-liter saucepan and fill it to capacity with purified water. We place the pan over high heat, let the contents boil well, and then adjust the intensity of the burner to such a level that the broth in the pan does not boil, but only shows signs of movement. Bones should simmer, not boil. We do not cover the container with the workpiece and leave it to evaporate to about half its volume. As a rule, if you put the bones on the stove in the morning, you will get the desired result by the evening.
Now prepare the vegetables. We peel the carrots, garlic cloves and onions, chop the components arbitrarily, but not coarsely, and fry them in flavorless vegetable oil in a frying pan, depending on its size, in portions or all at once until soft. At the end of frying, add tomato paste, simmer everything together a little more and put it in a pan with bones when the desired reduced result is achieved. Add water again. The pan should be three-quarters full of bones, vegetables and broth. Place the vessel back on the stove, pour in dry red wine, and after boiling, turn down the heat again to simmer the ingredients. If it is not possible to leave the preparation for slow cooking overnight, then continue preparing the sauce the next day in the morning.
After the mass has boiled down and reduced in volume by half, remove the bones from it, and also catch the vegetables and grind them through a sieve. A blender can be used in this case if you are sure that bone fragments have not gotten into the vegetable mass. In this case, it’s better not to be lazy and use a small sieve.
We also filter the remaining broth in the pan and mix it with the resulting puree. Place the vessel on low heat again and simmer the sauce until it has a thick texture. From the specified number of components you should get about one and a half liters of sauce, which, when ready and if desired, is seasoned with salt and pepper.
The composition of the Demi-glace sauce can be varied by adding herbs and spices. The most commonly used are rosemary, thyme, various types of peppers and cloves.
Using the concentrated Demi-glace sauce as a basis, you can prepare a delicious creamy sauce for meat steaks or other meat dishes.
Demi-glace is not an ordinary sauce. You will have to work hard to prepare it, even more than one hour. The base is made from beef bones and vegetables, it turns out incredibly aromatic, rich, and will be a wonderful addition to any dish.
Demi-glace sauce - general principles of preparation
Bones. There should be a lot of them; the presence of meat is not necessary, but there may be leftovers. The seeds should be washed thoroughly before use. If the quality of the product is in doubt, it is better to soak it in cold water for several hours. According to the classic recipe, the bones are first baked in the oven, then boiled in water for several hours. Sometimes the process can take almost a whole day.
Vegetables. Usually these are onions, carrots, celery. There are recipes with tomato, you can use tomatoes. Vegetables are added to the meat bones. Next, the sauce is boiled again for several hours. In the classic French recipe, three types of onions were initially used, but later they began to use the one that was available.
Wine. It makes the taste of the Demi-glace sauce deeper, more unusual, and emphasizes the meat notes. Red wine is usually used.
Spices. You need to salt and pepper the sauce and add all kinds of aromatic herbs at the very end, since during the long-term heat treatment and boiling of the mass there is a chance of over-salting, adding extra pepper or spoiling the taste with spices.
Demi-glace sauce with red wine
This recipe for Demi-glace sauce can be considered a classic version. It is the one most often found in French cooking. The base takes a long time to prepare, but you can boil the seeds in advance.
Ingredients
4 kg beef bones;
600 grams of carrots;
600 grams of onion;
100 grams of vegetable oil;
400 ml dry red wine;
6 cloves of garlic;
400 g fresh celery.
Preparation
1. Wash the beef bones and place them on a baking sheet. Put it in the oven, bake until brownish at 200 degrees. You need to make sure they don't burn.
2. Now put the bones in a saucepan with a capacity of ten liters. Fill with water to the very top, leave a few centimeters to boil. Cook the bones without a lid for about five hours; on the sides, the amount of liquid will not be reduced by half. At the same time, we do not allow the liquid to actively gurgle.
3. As soon as there is exactly half of the water in the pan, add all the chopped vegetables and garlic cloves to the bones, add enough boiling water so that the water becomes 2/3, cook the broth again until half of the liquid has evaporated.
4. We take out the seeds and throw them away. We rub the boiled vegetables through a sieve and strain the rich broth.
5. Add red wine and butter to the broth with vegetables, put it on the stove again, and boil until a thick mass is obtained.
6. This quantity of products should yield approximately 1.5 liters of demi-glace. At the end, add salt and pepper to the sauce. French cooks often add rosemary, thyme, cloves and other spices to it.
Demi-glace sauce with tomato (simplified recipe)
To prepare this “Demi-glace” sauce you will need fewer ingredients, but it will be slightly inferior in taste to the original.
Ingredients
1.3 kg of seeds;
150 ml red wine;
100 grams of tomato puree;
300 g each of celery, carrots, onions;
Spices, bouquet garni, oil.
Preparation
1. Place the washed bones on a baking sheet and sprinkle with oil. Bake at 200 degrees until lightly browned.
2. Take out the seeds. Lubricate with tomato puree or slightly diluted tomato paste.
3. Chop the onions and carrots. Chop the celery into large pieces. Place the vegetables on top of the seeds and also sprinkle with vegetable oil.
4. Place the seeds back into the oven and cook until the vegetables are browned.
5. Transfer the food from the baking sheet into the pan, add water so that the liquid covers the contents by about five centimeters. Place on the stove and cook until the water has evaporated by half.
6. Now take out the seeds. Add wine to vegetables. Boil the liquid for about fifteen minutes.
7. Remove the sauce from the heat and wipe the vegetables. Be sure to strain everything so that no shards of beef bones accidentally get into the sauce.
8. Now you can boil the sauce with the addition of salt, pepper, and add a bouquet garni. Boil for a few minutes and you're done!
Demi-glace sauce with cream
To prepare this sauce you will need a concentrated Demi-glace sauce base. You can prepare it according to the first recipe.
Ingredients
100 ml sauce;
70 ml cream;
20 ml olive oil;
90 g onion;
15 g butter;
3 spoons of wine.
Preparation
1. Combine both types of oil in a frying pan or small saucepan and melt on the stove.
2. Peel the onion. Cut the head into small cubes, add to the oil, fry for about three minutes, turn the heat to moderate.
3. Add red wine to the onions. Let the alcoholic drink evaporate for a minute.
4. Pour in the cream. Heat with onion until almost boiling, stir occasionally.
5. Add concentrated demi-glace broth to the creamy sauce. Stir.
6. Turn the heat to minimum, cover the vessel, and cook under the lid for about five minutes so that the flavors meld.
7. At the end, you need to taste the sauce, add a little salt and pepper if necessary.
Demi-glace sauce (adapted recipe)
A simplified recipe for French sauce using regular brown broth. The bones need to be fried in the oven, then simply boiled for 2.5-3 hours, be sure to strain.
Ingredients
1.5 liters of broth;
0.5 onions, carrots, celery;
120 g melted butter;
70 g flour;
Spoon of tomato paste;
0.5 glasses of wine;
Four tablespoons of vegetable oil.
For the sachet you will need a bay leaf. A few sprigs of parsley, thyme, rosemary. We tie it all in a gauze bag. You can add cloves, peppercorns, and a piece of ginger.
Preparation
1. Fry chopped onions in vegetable oil until transparent, add carrots and celery.
2. In another bowl, heat the ghee, add flour and fry until golden brown. Stir the mixture constantly, never leaving for a minute. Pour in half the broth and simmer the sauce until it thickens. Can be removed from heat.
3. Add tomato paste to the fried vegetables, after a couple of minutes add wine.
4. Simmer the vegetables in wine a little, then pour in the remaining broth. Cook covered for about half an hour.
5. Wipe the vegetables with the broth.
6. Combine both masses, add salt and pepper to your taste, stir. For aroma, add a sachet with spices.
7. Place on the stove, boil everything together for about five minutes, then keep under the lid for about half an hour. Then the sachet must be removed, otherwise the sauce will have an overly pronounced aroma.
Demi-glace sauce with mushrooms
To prepare this sauce you will need a base of concentrated demi-glace. Champignons are used here because they are the most affordable and fastest to prepare.
Ingredients
150 g concentrated Demi-glace sauce;
2 champignons;
0.5 onions;
0.2 glasses of wine;
1 tbsp. l. oils
Preparation
1. Wash the champignons, cut into thin slices, place in a frying pan, fry the pieces on both sides. Let's remove it.
2. Cut the onion into half rings. Place in a frying pan after the mushrooms and fry until translucent. We're bringing back the mushrooms.
3. We pour wine over it all. We wait. Until it completely evaporates.
4. Add sauce.
5. Cover the frying pan and simmer over low heat for about ten minutes. At the very end we try. If necessary, add salt and pepper.
Demi-glace sauce with cherries
A recipe for an incredibly interesting Demi-glace sauce, which requires cherries in wine. Prepare the base according to one of the recipes above.
Ingredients
100 g cherries;
150 g wine;
15 g sugar;
200 ml sauce;
1 tsp. butter.
Preparation
1. We remove the seeds from the cherries; the weight of clean berries is indicated in the recipe.
2. Melt the butter, add the berries, and warm up slightly.
3. Mix wine and sugar, pour in cherries. Cover and simmer until soft.
4. As soon as the berries are cooked, add demi-glace to them. Stir, salt and pepper to taste.
5. Simmer the sauce with cherries on the stove for a few more minutes to combine the flavors.
6. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Serve cherry sauce with meat or poultry.
Meat in Demi-glace sauce
A simple recipe for a flavorful meat dish using meat sauce. Veal is indicated here, but you can also take pork, lamb, it will turn out tasty and tender in any version.
Ingredients
600 g veal;
200 g Demi-glace sauce;
1 tbsp. l. oils;
1 pinch of salt.
Preparation
1. Cut the veal into half-centimeter slices. Lightly tap on one side with a hammer.
2. Rub the pieces with salt and grease with the prepared sauce. Leave to marinate for 40-50 minutes.
3. Place the veal in one layer in a greased pan. Bake at 200 degrees until golden brown.
4. Remove the pan from the oven. Pour the remaining sauce over the pieces. Cover with a piece of foil.
5. Return to the oven. Reduce the temperature to 180 degrees, cook for about twenty minutes.
If you like the French sauce, then it’s more convenient to prepare a lot of base for the demi-glace at once. It can be poured into molds or containers and frozen. At the right time, the mass can be melted on the stove, supplemented with the necessary spices, and refreshed with wine.
When cooking bones for sauce, do not let the broth boil actively. Otherwise, the base will turn out cloudy and not very appetizing in appearance.
Demi-glace turns out to be interesting in autumn in a spicy version. When adding vegetables to the broth, it is enough to throw in a chopped pod of hot chili pepper and simmer everything together. It’s even easier to add a little Georgian adjika to the total mass.
In the original, demi-glace sauce is nothing more than a heavily boiled, mostly beef or veal broth. The name itself literally translates to "semi-glaze" or half-glazed. This is one of the main sauces of French cuisine.
This is a very versatile sauce. It can be prepared once, poured into small containers and frozen. Thaw in batches, reheat before serving. And you can serve it with almost any meat. And an ordinary soup with the addition of a small amount of this miracle will become divine and one can safely say exquisite!
There are many cooking methods demi-glace sauce, every avid cook has their own favorite version.
The common thing is to prepare the broth on pre-baked meat bones, then boil it for a long time and add alcohol, before the third stage of preparation, the final boiling of the already strained broth. Mostly dry red wine or sherry is added. I prefer sherry (some intellectuals call sherry “sherry” :-)), I love its nutty notes. And what I love most is demi-glace based on veal meat bones. Overall it turns out so tender, but at the same time rich.
And if you want to experiment, prepare the most common version of the sauce, using beef bones and adding red wine.
About alcohol: it completely evaporates, because after adding alcohol, you boil for a long time! All that remains is the desired aftertaste.
Properly prepared demi-glace sauce completely solidifies when cooled, like jellied meat.
About 1.3 -1.5 liters of sauce
- 4 kg veal bones, with pieces of meat on the bone
- 2 carrots, peeled, coarsely chopped
- 2 onions, peeled, cut in half
- 1 bunch herbs of your preference
- 200 ml sweet sherry (can be replaced with Madeira or Muscat wine)
- 1 tbsp. salt
1. Preheat the oven to 180ᵒ C.
2. Wash the veal bones and dry with a paper towel. Place in a large heatproof dish. Place in the oven and bake, turning occasionally, until the bones are evenly browned.
3. Remove the bones from the oven, transfer to a large saucepan, I have 10 liters. Fill with cold water so that the water is about 5 cm above the bones. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for 24 hours. During the first hour, use a slotted spoon to actively remove foam and floating fat. Add boiling water as needed so that the bones are covered with water at all times. At night, you can add more water than usual, since you won’t have to monitor the broth for 8 hours.
How much does demi-glace sauce cost (average price per 1 kg)?
Moscow and Moscow region.
Demi-glace sauce belongs to the national dishes of France and is rightfully considered a classic of world gastronomy. It is no coincidence that demi-glace or demi-glace is called a legendary sauce. French chefs began experimenting with sauce recipes back in the Middle Ages. Since then, almost every sauce in French cuisine has become not just popular, but has been ranked among the masterpieces of world cuisine. Take, for example, the famous bechamel, velouté or espagnole sauces, which are considered the basis of all French cooking. This list can safely include demi-glace sauce, the original name of which sounds like demi-glace, which literally means “half ice.”
Demi glace sauce is classified as a meat type, this is due, first of all, to the composition of the product. Demi-glace sauce is based on a steep meat broth, which is cooked from beef bones. Demi-glace sauce began to be considered a classic sauce thanks to the famous 19th century chef and gourmet Antonin Careme. It was in the 19th century that they began to remember and revive forgotten traditions and, because For almost two centuries, European cooks preferred previously unseen Asian spices and herbs. However, after experimenting with exotic flavors, the chefs decided to go back to the roots.
The 19th century gave a lot to world gastronomy, because... At this time, the famous sauces of French, Italian, English and German cuisine received a second life, and the taste and aroma of some of them even sounded new. Mr. Karem ranked demi-glace among the eight so-called “mother” sauces, on the basis of which others are made. However, demi glace sauce is itself a derivative and traces its history back to the classic meat brown sauce espagnole. We can say that the basis of demi-glace is Espanol sauce, the recipe and method of preparation of which have been slightly changed.
Demi-glace sauce is made from, to which vegetables, as well as spices and herbs are added. Typically, demi-glace sauce is made with onions, celery, carrots, parsley and tomatoes. Brown, rich meat broth plays first fiddle in the demi-glace sauce recipe. That is why it is important to carefully select meat for demi-glace sauce. Usually beef or veal shanks are used; the thicker the meat broth, the more refined and brighter the taste of the demi-glace sauce. One liter of demi-glace broth is obtained from three liters of water and a kilogram of starting ingredients.
To prepare demi-glace sauce, you must first prepare the meat ingredients. We wash the meat and separate the pulp from the bones. The bones should be chopped and tinted in the oven. It is better to cut vegetables and herbs into large pieces and fry them with the addition of spices and herbs. Do not rush to wash the bones on which the meat bones were baked; using a glass of water, you can collect valuable meat juice, which should be mixed with the vegetable mass. Pieces of meat also need to be baked in the oven and the resulting fat and meat juice must be collected in a separate container. At the final stage, all ingredients are mixed together and boiled.
The process of preparing demi-glace sauce takes about 12 hours. This is a painstaking and diligent process that true connoisseurs or professionals can do. Nowadays, you can buy ready-made demi-glace sauce, produced industrially. This product tastes good, but can never compare with fresh homemade and just prepared classic French meat sauce demi-glace.
Calorie content of demi-glace sauce 51 kcal
Energy value of demi-glace sauce (Ratio of proteins, fats, carbohydrates - bju).
