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Once the stock is cool there are more options. I usually freeze four or five ice cube- trays full. These stock blocks will be moved to freezer bags and used to mount sauces on down the line. The rest of the stock goes into 1-quart plastic containers. (I’m a Rubbermaid man, but Tupperware is darned fine, too.) The important thing is that the container be shaped so that a giant stocksicle can slide right out.

“It’ll never slide right out,” you say? It will if you lay a piece of butcher’s twine or dental floss (unflavored, of course) down one side and up the other (see illustration). Think of it as a ripcord for the frozen liquid of your choice.

Now what? Well, now you’ve got a full-bodied, flavorful liquid for any occasion. That pot of collards we were talking about? Use stock instead of water. And soup—everything in the kitchen can be soup if you have stock around. The best soup I’ve ever tasted was composed of leftover mushroom risotto, seared chicken thighs, parsley, and homemade chicken stock . . . delicious.

Pan Sauces

I blame the demise of pan sauce-making on non-stick pans. Sure, I’ve got a few myself but I only use them for eggs, crêpes, that sort of thing. The problem is that non-stick pans do not work with you when it comes to sauce making. Steel and iron pans are the sauce maker’s friend because stuff sticks to them and that stuff is called fond.

Fond is (of course) French, but the word derives from the Latin fundus, meaning “bottom” or “property.” In modern usage it means the basis or foundation of something—as in a sauce.

Say you seared a steak in a pan, or roasted a pork loin in a roasting pan. Once you pull the meat from the metal, you notice that the bottom is covered with a dark and no-doubt nasty crust. Your first instinct is to toss that pan in the sink to scrub later. That would be a shame.

The first step to converting that grimy crust to a sauce is to decide what to do with any fat in the pan. You basically have two choices: build a roux or defat the pan. If the beast in question is a turkey or a roast that might be nice with a gravy, you would go the roux path, which we’ll get to shortly.

A juicy flank steak or porterhouse, on the other hand, is not something that screams “gravy.” There is enough richness in such meats to satisfy the tongue, so you’re better off with a “lean” pan sauce, or one that has been finished with a little butter or an aged cheese like gorgonzola (or both, see Blue Butter). Unless you seared an incredibly lean piece of meat, odds are good that some fat exited from it and is hanging around the pan. If you pan fried or sautéed something—say, turkey cutlets—then there will definitely be a good bit of fat left hanging around.

Fat gets in the way of deglazing, that is, to add liquid to the hot pan in order to loosen and dissolve the browned bits of goodness stuck to the bottom of said pan.34 Most recipes suggest simply burning off the fat, but that will probably send a lot of great-tasting juices with it. There are three strategies:

1. Pour off the fat, sacrifice the liquid, and live with it. You’ll still be able to deglaze but oh, what a waste.

2. Allow the cooked meat to rest on a resting rack so that you capture any and all juices. Then remove the meat and place the bowl in the freezer for a few minutes. The fat will lift right off and you can return the juice to the pan.

3. My favorite method, especially for poultry, is to rest the meat in the pan, and then drain the collected liquid into a gravy separator. Add enough water and/or wine to the liquid to lift the oil well above the spigot of the separator. Then I use this liquid to deglaze the pan. Reduce by half over high heat and add a handful of parsley for the final minute and you have a simple, fresh jus.

What other liquid should you use to deglaze the pan? As long as it’s a water-type liquid, the sky’s the limit. Alcohols, be it wine or bourbon or beer or cognac, are favorites because they: