Shortcut to a Great Sauce

The rule in good cooking is that the foundation to a great sauce is great stock. Unfortunately for most of us home cooks making great stock is just not that practical. A great stock takes hours and hours to make - in fact they urge you to be slowly cooking your contents for a day! We're urged then to store the product in the freezer for when we want it. All good stuff but not very practical for most of us who are working hard and don't have tons of time on are hands.

The following is a shortcut I've developed based upon techniques I've observed on Iron Chef where they have to develop a lot of flavor in a short amount of time. The total time this takes is around an hour. The pictures below represent my throwing this together as part of a meal a made for an out of town business guest.

Ingredients:

I start with a canned broth - beef in this case - so I've got some pre-existing flavor base to start from. Then I'm going to need elements from each of the five flavor groups. In this case we have:

Sweet - Carrot, onion, garlic
Bitter - Celery, parsely
Sour - Wine
Salt - Salt Pork and salt
Umami - Salt pork and cured salami

One of the keys is to use a lot of each ingredient because you want to get a lot of flavor into the broth. I also cut everything pretty small since there wasn't going to be a lot of time for flavor extraction.

I've started with all the veggies but the parsley and the two meat products. I cooked them in some oil at a low heat so they don't brown but start getting soft (sweating).

Then I add my broth, wine, parsley, salt and pepper. In this case I used two cups each of broth and wine because I wanted a winey/sour Germanic type sauce. You can change your proportions of the various flavors to alter the outcome. For example you could use a lower proportion of wine to broth for a less wine based flavor.

I then cooked it at a medium heat for about 40 minutes to get a good reduction.

Then strain out the solids, put the sauce back in the pan and reduce over a higher heat.

I could have reduced this down to a pretty concentrated sauce but I wanted a good volume so I chose to thicken it instead with a slurry of corn starch and water.

Here's the finished product on a boneless pork chop with homemade spaetzle.