I have done many experiments and concluded that you can make a totally convincing homemade
demi-glace by simply combining these store-bought ingredients in these proportions and then
just boiling them for awhile. That's it. I swear it works, and having a bag of demi-glace
ice cubes in the house will turn your meat dishes into treasures for which you will weep
when absent.
And I'm not calling this faux demi-glace, or ersatz demi-glace. I'm calling it demi-glace
— we're just taking a very different route to that destination.
Let's quickly recap what demi-glace is. No less an authority than Anthony Bourdain writes:
"classically, Demi-glace was a reduction of equal parts reduced veal stock and sauce espagnole.
No one makes espagnole anymore. What most restaurants refer to as 'demi' is simply a
strong, dark, highly reduced veal stock that has been strained and reduced again with red
wine and shallots."
And even that last thing Bourdain said would be debated by some chefs. The core idea is
it's a dark meat stock made with roasted bones and joints — traditionally veal bones, but
this is Chef John's much less expensive cheat that combines chicken wings and beef shanks.
Anyway, you simmer that stuff for literally a day, strain it out, then you gotta skim
off the fat, reduce the stock until it's within striking distance of this — glace, or glaze.
Meat glaze.
Demi-glace is halfway to being glace. Demi means half. Anyway, to make this much more
efficiently out of modern, widely-available industrial food products, the first thing
we need is pre-packaged broth or stock. The standard 1 quart carton is the core unit of
my recipe here. A quart is just shy of a liter.
For each carton we'll need about one teaspoon of tomato paste. So, into my big pot I'm just
squeezing out six approximate teaspoons for the six quarts of stock I'm gonna boil down.
Then I'm turning the heat on medium.
There's no fat in the pan. I don't want to have to skim fat off this at the end. I'm
just gonna mash that around and very gently brown the tomato paste. What this step replicates
is the common technique where chefs coat the veal bones in tomato paste before roasting
them. It gives you some nice caramelized sugar, some brick-red color and a lot of umami.
But I've found that if I let this burn in the slightest, it ruins the whole batch. So
I'm very conservative. As soon as the paste stuck to the pan just starts to brown — I
can see it, I can smell it — that's good enough. Deglaze with the first carton. Make
sure the bottom of the pan is clean and nothing is gonna burn. Then in goes five more quarts.
Use veal stock if you can find it. I think chicken is fine for this, and while broth
is technically made of meat while stock is technically made from bones, I don't think
it really matters which you have for our purposes here, and I'm not sure there's much of a difference
with the pre-packaged stuff.
What's imperative is that whatever you buy is low-sodium — the lowest salt content
you can find — or it'll be inedibly salty by the time you reduce it. And quality matters.
I tried a lot of brands before I landed on this one. It has hardly any salt and great
flavor.
I tried mixing some beef broth with the chicken to better approximate veal, and it just didn't
work. Most beef broth on the market in my world is somewhat artificially flavored and
it really gave the demi-glace a canned soup taste. Better to use a high-quality, very
low-salt broth from the wrong animal.
The next thing, believe it or not, will be soy sauce. A very small amount. Just a teaspoon
per quart of broth. Low-sodium soy sauce is best for this if you've got it, but I don't
think it's worth a special purchase.
Trust me, this will not taste like East Asian food at the end. This tiny amount of soy sauce
will just supply a lot of the same flavor compounds we would get by roasting the bones
for the stock.
You usually roast some onions with the bones, so I'm putting in half a teaspoon of onion
powder per quart of stock. You could skip that, honestly. Most pre-packaged broth products
have onion in them anyway.
What you cannot skip is this: gelatin. This is what you dissolve out of the connective
tissues of the veal bones. It's why joints are especially good for demi-glace — lots
of collagen in joints to break down into gelatin.
One standard 1/4 oz packet of unflavored, unsweetened gelatin per quart of broth. Those
packets are 7g each. Be aware that a lot of refined gelatin like this on the market is
made from pig parts. If you don't eat pig, look for halal or kosher gelatin.
And you generally scatter this stuff on to keep it from clumping up. We're putting in
so much that it's gonna clump no matter what. But it doesn't matter. The clumps just dissolve
in time, which is why I add this at the beginning of the process. Now, literally all we gotta
do is boil this on high heat until it is about one sixth of its original volume.
So, all six of those boxes are gonna be reduced to the volume of just one. I'm gonna pinch
my spoon at the original liquid level, then imagine cutting that length in half, then
imagine cutting the half into thirds, and there. When the liquid comes up to about there
on the spoon, we'll have 1/6th of the original volume.
As it reduces, you might notice some good stuff sticking to the walls. I try to scape
that off and get it dissolved again, and scrape the bottom to make sure nothing is sticking
and burning. But mostly, I just let this boil, largely unattended. It'll take a couple hours.
Plenty of time to prepare the new pan that I'm gonna use in this video, which is sponsored
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Here's our stock after an hour, reduced halfway. If you couldn't fit all of your cartons in
at the beginning, just wait until the first few reduce a bit and then put in the rest.
Here we are after two hours, and yep, that's about 1/6th of our original volume, and this
is done. You could keep reducing it down to a thick glaze, but it would be untenably sticky.
It's just easier to package and dose out this stuff if it's still got some water in it.
These are just standard ice cube trays I'm using. I'd say each cube of these will enrich
enough pan sauce for one person. Freeze those solid. Unpack into freezer bags and you're
locked and loaded.
Any time you're making any kind of meat sauce or stew, you just drop in a couple cubes and
let them reduce from demi-glace to glace. Let me taste that and make a mental note.
That's just our pre-packaged ingredients reduced — nothing else.
Now, here's a couple cubes of the demi-glace I made a while back closer to the traditional
way, with fresh animals parts that I bought from the store. Reduce that to a glaze and
taste. The texture of the two is identical, because gelatin is gelatin regardless of what
you boiled it out of it.
The flavor is almost identical, and very good in either case. That touch of soy sauce over
here really does replicate that taste of roasted bones. Now let's actually do something with
it.
I've got a hanger steak here from Rocking Chair Ranch in Monroe County, Georgia. I've
got a video about how to trim and portion this — it's in the description. A couple
little pseudo-loins of hanger go in the pan. They're coated in oil, salt and pepper.
A good sear all around, and then in goes butter, and I'll just baste these on medium-low heat
until pink inside, maybe 125 F on a thermometer, 50 C. Out they go to rest on the board. I'll
deglaze with just a little red wine.
I don't bother putting wine or shallots or anything in my demi-glace because I want to
keep my demi-glace versatile. It's really easy for me to add flavorings to it later.
And in goes three cubes of my new demi-glace. Time now to just reduce gently until thick.
Look at how syrupy that is. That's mostly the gelatin.
Heat off, bubbling stopped, and I like to finish with just a little cold butter to make
an emulsion. Some fresh thyme in there as well. And that is done. Slice up my hanger
steak, on the plate, and yeah, that sauce is just insane. The demi-glace gives it an
instant hit of intense meaty flavor and, more importantly, that indescribably luscious texture
you only get from gelatin.
All of this makes me wonder: What if we cut out the middle man? What if we just sprinkled
some gelatin right into a pan sauce, the same way you would with starch or something — just
to use it as thickener? In this case I've done some mushrooms with my hanger steak — the
mushrooms will provide a lot of that umami we would get from the reduced meat broth.
Deglaze with red wine and a little water, and then just I'll just sprinkle on my gelatin.
You won't know what its final thickness is gonna be until you let it cool to eating temperature.
It thickens as it cools. Needs a little more gelatin for thickening. I'll stir in some
whole sage leaves, and to keep the experiment pure — there's no butter at all in this
pan.
All of that texture here is provided by the gelatin, and yeah. That is pretty damn good.
It makes you wonder if demi-glace and all kinds of classic meat dishes would have evolved
quite differently if refined gelatin had always been readily available.
In the mirror universe where that happened, me with a goatee is probably saying, "Yeah,
I mean, if you're in like some kind of crazy survival situation where you can't get powdered
gelatin, you could I guess take like a billion animal parts and put them in a pot and boil
them for like a day. But I mean, that'd be crazy. That's be like boiling down 50 watermelons
to get a cup of sugar to bake with. Long live the Empire."