From the website, "Anny's Blog"
Here’s the thing about pan sauces: they break. At least, they do when I try to make them. But on the rare occasions when they hold together, they might well be the best thing you can make, or eat, or serve to someone else to eat. They are stupendous. I feel that I need to right that again. They are STUPENDOUS. And now I know how to make them right.
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The idea of a pan sauce is a simple one. You cook something in a metal - not teflon –pan on a hot stove, and pieces of that something get burnt on to the pan, along with whatever little somethings (garlic bits, onion dice, stray smears of tomato) was in there with them. After you take out the main something, there is all this stuck-on food which, having been burnt, is craggy and concentrated and sweet and intense. But if you tried to scrape it off with a spatula, you would have to work as hard as John Henry when he raced the steam driver. Plus you would get burned, and ruin the pan. So you pour some kind of liquid in, and the stuff comes right up. And better still, the stuff flavors the liquid.
Now, some people use wine to “deglaze” the plan, as the trick is called in cooking school. And others use water. You can do it with broth, too, or vinegar. But my problem was that no matter what I used, I could never get the sauce to hold together. I would cook down the wine, and add butter, and whisk it and whisk it and whisk it, but it in coalesced. And now I know why. Don’t laugh if you are a good cook, and you are reading this! Bad cooks like me need help too. That’s why I’m here. I am the Burnt Pan Lorax; I speak for the bad cooks.
Harold Moore, the talented chef from Commerce (you can see his chicken recipe here) showed me my error. First of all, my sauces were a big greasy mess because you are supposed to pour out most of the grease. Not to worry, it will still be plenty greasy! Harold allayed my fears on that one. And the butter isn’t helping any. What you really want is not butter at all, in fact, but cream. I should have seen this coming. After all, the greatest of all American pan sauces is chicken gravy — something else I can’t make, by the way — which is all cream. Duh!
Anyway, I tried out Harold’s receip on a little flank steak I cooked in my cast-iron skillet last night. I opened the windows and the door to vent the place out, and really hit the meat hard, along with some shallots and garlic. I didn’t blacken it, exactly, but I came close. When the steak was done, I pulled it and, not without regret, poured off almost all the fat. Then I deglazed it with a little wine, and let it cook down, and then added some heavy cream - maybe a third of a cup. And then I cooked that down. It was a pan gravy, no Wondra flour OR butter required, and thickeners of any other kind either - no arrowroot, cornstarch, or the various non-newtonian fluids modernist chefs keep in the spice racks. I threw in some parsley at the end and the effect was just amazing. It was like all the great, rich, winey, acidic, and utterly delicious french bistro food I remembered from when I was young and bistros still made good pan sauces. Why did they ever stop??