Menu focus

Focus on stocks and sauces: it's all gravy...

By Alison Baker

- Last updated on GMT

'A stock pot is not a rubbish bin'
'A stock pot is not a rubbish bin'

Related tags Beef

Warming winter dishes are often made better with good stocks and sauces. Alison Baker discovers how you can improve your menu and maintain consistency whether you make your own or buy in

To quote the great French chef and restaurateur Auguste Escoffier: “... stock is everything in cooking... without it, nothing can be done. If one’s stock is good, what remains of the work is easy.” High praise indeed, from the person who first brought the humble stock cube to Britain.

With stocks and sauces at the core of every menu and with the onset of the winter months approaching, chefs need to consider how to use them effectively to create warming and comforting food to entice consumers who want to stave off the cold.

According to Mark Dodson, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred pub restaurant the Masons Arms in Knowstone, Devon, winter is the time for richer sauces and more robust flavours.

“We’re already using a lot of game and will continue to do so over the winter months, particularly hare, partridge and venison, which can all take a strong flavoured sauce,” he says.

“We often serve venison with a deep red wine sauce to which we add grated chocolate,” he adds. “The chocolate gives a lovely gloss to the sauce and takes away the bitterness of the red wine.”

Juniper, thyme and cranberries may all feature on the Exmoor pub’s winter menu during the coming months, with dishes such as fillet of brill cooked on the bone and served with a cider sauce, and beef fillet with oxtail cannelloni and a rich red wine sauce also planned.

Make or buy?

Meanwhile, the votes are still out on whether stocks and sauces should be made fresh or not. More frequent deliveries, meaning less surplus stock, time pressures and a move away from sauce-laden dishes has left opinion divided as to whether the end justifies the means when it comes to stock and sauce making.

At the Masons Arms, all stocks and sauces are made in-house “for quality and consistency” explains Dodson.

However, the award-winning chef believes that bought-in varieties do have their place in high-volume operations.

“They’re a great time-saving measure, provided chefs ensure that they’re using a good-quality product,” says Dodson. “Buy in half a dozen and try them all — some will be very powdery or have too much monosodium glutamate (MSG) but there are some good ones out there,” he adds.

Dodson also advises time-poor chefs to opt for cream sauces or dressings instead of a labour-intensive stock-based sauce, if they’re short on time.

The need for quality control and provenance, particularly since the introduction of the 2014 Food Information to Consumer regulations (FIC), has influenced the in-house production of stocks and sauces at Yorkshire’s Ye Old Sun Inn in Colton, Tadcaster.

However, due to the inconsistency of vegetable stocks, chef owner Ashley McCarthy buys Unilever Food Solution’s Knorr vegetable stock cubes. “We use them in our soups, vegetarian dishes, couscous and braised rice and they also assist with portion control,” he explains.

Complement the dish

Chefs looking for a ready-made product might want to consider Knorr’s Professional Jelly Bouillon, which Unilever claims is the closest product to scratch-made stock currently available on the market. The stocks, which are available in beef, vegetable and chicken varieties do not contain any of the 14 allergens outlined in the FIC guidelines.

“A sauce should complement and finish off the dish, it’s not the dish,” maintains Dodson, who serves between 80 and 200 covers a week at his restaurant during the winter months.

“Nobody wants to see food drowning in sauce and there’s nothing more frustrating for a chef, after the time and cost spent making it, than to see a whole plateful coming back. Our customers can always ask for a jug of extra sauce if they want more.”

McCarthy agrees with Dodson that less is more when it comes to sauce and says: “The presentation and amount of sauce served needs to fit with the style of the dish and any accompaniments. I prefer to serve sauce over the fish or meat but would never flood it and often use sauce pots or shot glasses rather than just pouring the sauce over.”

“A stock pot is not a rubbish bin and should be respected,” McCarthy adds. “What goes into a stock is very important. Because a stock is reduced so much, if the flavours aren’t right to start with, you will notice. The stock should be cared for like a dish — it’s a valuable commodity.”

The chef, who makes approximately 19 litres of stock gravy and sauce a week, does utilise the fruit growing in the grounds of Ye Old Sun Inn during the autumn to make a mulled wine stock, which is suitable for use in both sweet and savoury sauces. He also uses herbs from the freehold pub’s garden.

With deliveries six days a week, the pub’s kitchen has very little in the way of surplus stock and utilises the ‘home-grown’ stock on its specials board wherever possible. “We butcher quite a bit of our meat ourselves so we do put any trimmings into our stock as well as the ribs that come with our belly pork,” McCarthy adds.

Stock to your guns

Chef-patron James Durrant of the Plough Inn in Longparish, Hampshire, is a firm believer in finding the right recipe for stock and then sticking to it.

Durrant, whose recipe dates back to his time spent working for Gordon Ramsay, buys ingredients for the veal and chicken stocks and vegetable broth he makes for his 55-seat restaurant, rather than using leftovers from the pub’s kitchen. “If you use things like carrot peelings in your stocks, you’re not going to get any consistency of flavour or quality,” he says.

“Our veal stock cooks for 24 hours, so the vegetables need to be cut fairly large to avoid them cooking into a mush and creating a cloudy stock,” he says.

The former Great British Menu winner also adds a lot of vinegar to his sauces. “Once I’ve caramelised the bones, I often deglaze with a vinegar reduction, which gives the sauce a sweet and sour taste to it,” he explains.

The Enterprise Inns lessee used vinegar in his veal blanquette, which accompanied his 10 out of 10 ‘Blitz Spirit’ main course on the BBC TV programme. “The veal cheeks I used as part of the dish were quite fatty, so the acidity of the vinegar cut right through,” says Durrant.

A popular dish at the pub is guinea fowl served with a chicken consommé. The consommé — made from whole chickens, which are roasted to give an intense flavour and the resulting liquid clarified — is both light and warming, and served with a fresh herb infusion in a glass teapot.

Other winter favourites are likely to include pigeon sauce with Madeira wine and juniper berries, mallard duck served with a rich sauce made from star anise, red wine and port and cured beef salad with a charcoal mayonnaise.