What sauce should be served on steak?

Steak is one of the most common foods in Western cuisine, and the main ways to cook it are frying and grilling. Just like the barbecue we usually eat, simply eating meat is not enough. If you want it to taste good, you need to season it with seasonings. The same goes for steak. After the steak is cooked, a layer of special sauce is poured on it. Whether it tastes good or not depends entirely on this. So, what sauce should be served on steak? Let’s take a look below.

Demi-glace (beef bone gravy)

Since we are talking about sauces, we must first talk about Demi-glace. This thick sauce made from beef bones has almost become the ancestor of half of the traditional sauces. The basic method of making Demi-glace was first created by the French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935). The recipe is not difficult to find. It is nothing more than roasted beef bones with veal broth and some other ingredients. However, the difficulty of this sauce is exactly in line with the name of Stephen Chow’s movie - Kung Fu. To make this sauce, you need to turn the beef bones over every 20 minutes in the oven for 5 hours, then put them in the soup and simmer on low heat for 72 hours. The purpose is to fully volatilize the aroma that penetrates deep into the bone marrow, and then blend all the collagen in the beef bones into the soup. The Demi-glace made in this way has an extraordinary strong beef flavor. It is usually not eaten directly with food, but used as the base sauce for other sauces. The natural and authentic beef gravy is transformed into classic dishes on the French table in the skillful hands of chefs.

Sauce béarnaise

Pommes sauce, which was recorded in recipes as early as 1836, is a derivative of French Dutch sauce. The sauce was named in honor of Henry IV, so it was named after Béarn, the birthplace of the founder of the Bourbon dynasty. The mellow egg and milk aroma and the smooth taste make it the perfect match for steak in summer. The authentic Pommes sauce must be made in a water bath at 56-62 degrees warm water. Because the temperature of the sauce is only around 30 degrees when it is served on the table, it is also called semi-hot sauce. Due to its long history, foreign food critics are extremely demanding on the pomegranate sauce in restaurants. When Wilson was studying cooking with a tutor in France, he once chatted with a lady in her 50s and found that when she tasted pomegranate sauce, she could taste the flavor of white wine vinegar on the tip of her tongue and feel the milky aroma provided by clear butter at the root of her tongue. At the end of the conversation I found out that this person used to be a Michelin rating staff. That kind of taste aesthetic that is so demanding to the point of being extreme once made me confused and fascinated for a long time. .

Sauce au poivre (black pepper sauce)

I believe everyone is familiar with the most popular steak sauce, but if you want to evaluate the quality of black pepper sauce in a restaurant, you still need to put in some effort. Authentic black pepper sauce must be prepared with Demi-glace as the base sauce (in order to save costs, many Western restaurants in China use barbecue sauce powder purchased from the market and diluted with water to replace Demi-glace. This substitute is completely incomparable to the real sauce). Based on Demi-glace, various spices such as freshly ground black pepper, brandy, fresh rosemary, etc. are added and slowly simmered over low heat. The flavor of a good black pepper sauce is distinct and layered. You first taste the strong black pepper flavor, then you can taste the faint aroma of brandy when you chew the beef. Finally, the mellowness of the roasted beef bones and the smoothness of collagen wrap the beef and slide into your throat.

Sauce aux Champignons (Mushroom sauce)

Mushroom juice is a large family, using cream as the base and adding different mushrooms to reflect the unique flavor of each mushroom. In this large family, the most luxurious ones are black truffle juice made from French black truffles, morel juice made from morels, and the relatively easier to obtain porcini juice. Of course, if you don’t have that much money and just want to taste the sweet and tender mushroom juice, no problem. White button mushrooms have been increasingly accepted by the public in recent years due to their super high cost-effectiveness. The characteristic of mushroom juice is that it retains and highlights the delicious original flavor of mushrooms. Speaking of this, it is more or less inevitable to have a literary and artistic taste. I still remember that when my French instructor was talking about mushroom juice, he emphasized to me that the highest pursuit of making mushroom juice is that with every sip, you should feel as if you are lying on the soft and green grass in the forest, with naturally grown mushrooms scattered around you. The intoxicated look on his face as he described the recipe, with his head slightly raised and his eyes lightly closed, appears in my mind every time I boil the juice.