Demi Glaze Basics

• Demi glaze, or "demi-glace" in the original French term, is a concentrated sauce that provides the base for a number of other preparations. Although it doesn't have a strong flavor of its own, it's intensely meaty, and it's rich and full-bodied enough to give a pleasantly concentrated mouth feel to sauces made from it. There are a whole family of those, including well-known classics such as Chateaubriand sauce and Madeira sauce.

Classic Demi Glaze

• The first step in making a classic demi glaze is to brew up a pot of brown stock. You make that by roasting veal marrowbones until they're well-browned, along with onions, celery, carrots and a small amount of tomato paste. Once they're roasted, you simmer them in water with peppercorns and thyme until you've got a strong broth. Then you thicken part of that broth with flour and add flavorings, producing a basic brown sauce. Finally you mix the brown sauce and the brown stock in equal amounts, and simmer the mixture until it reduces to half of its original volume. Traditionally, it's finished with a dash of Madeira or sherry to give a more rounded flavor.

Modern Demi Glaze

• Modern chefs often skip the intermediate step of creating a basic brown sauce from their brown stock. Instead, they'll simply reduce good-quality brown stock to half of its original volume, adding extra flavoring ingredients if necessary. This produces a lighter version of the classic "demi," with a cleaner, clearer flavor. If you keep reducing the broth until it reaches one-twelfth to one-sixteenth of its original volume, it produces a thick, syrupy liquid called "glace de viande" or meat glaze. The term "demi-glace" originally indicated that it was a mid-point between broth and a full-blown glaze.

Using Demi Glaze

• Once you've made your demi-glaze, it can be frozen in small quantities for later use or kept in the fridge in a sterilized canning jar. In most cases, sauces made with demi glaze have several other ingredients. They're usually made by adding shallots and other aromatic ingredients to the pan juices from your meal, then "deglazing" the pan with a splash of wine. The demi glaze is added next, often along with broth or cream, and simmered until it reaches the correct degree of thickness. Then the finished sauce is strained and spooned over the meal.