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• are water-type liquids;

• contain a lot of flavor; and

• contain alcohol, which can dissolve and impart alcohol-soluble flavor compounds to the sauce.

Other deglazing options include everything from tea to Perrier, but unless I’m just cleaning the pan, I avoid straight water because it doesn’t bring any flavor to the party whatsoever.

Add enough liquid to cover the bottom of the pan by about a ¼ inch.

Bring the liquid to a boil, scraping the pan often with a wooden spatula. Allow the liquid to reduce by half. By then anything worth keeping in the sauce will be dissolved. If no flour was involved in the cooking process you will be left with a thin liquid—not something that is going to cling to a forkful of meat and ride its way to your mouth. Here you have two choices. Add butter (tasty, glossy, thick, and fattening) or a touch of stock (tasty, glossy, thick, and fat-free). Or you can go with a combination of stock and a flavored butter like our Herbed Compound Butter. Add this, with perhaps some minced herbs, at the last possible moment, and stir or whisk to combine. You’ll be amazed at how a sauce appears out of nowhere.

Tilt the pan so that the sauce collects at the base of the wall and spoon it onto the meat, not on the side. Don’t pour straight from the pan, because you never know when some brown bit on the bottom was actually a burned bit, which won’t dissolve as readily as its unburned pan-mates. Spooning will prevent you from delivering burned crunchy things to the platter along with an otherwise perfect sauce.

Gravy

If the food in question is a large roast—a pork loin or a turkey, for example—a gravy might be appropriate. (My general rule is that unless the critter gets carved after cooking, gravy just wouldn’t be right.) Gravy is a starch-thickened sauce. Traditional American gravies are based on either meat drippings or milk, thickened with starch. The word gravy comes from the Latin granatus or “full of grains.”

The easiest way to make gravy is to take advantage of what is in the pan when the roast comes out of the oven: fond and a fat that’s full of the flavor of the food you just took out of the pan. Of course, if the food in question was dredged in flour before being sautéed or pan-fried (you’d never dredge a food destined for searing, would you?) then you are already in possession of a basic roux, which you must take advantage of.

Choose Your Starch

Starches make great thickeners. When individual starch granules meet up with hot liquids, they break open, releasing long chains of glucose. If there’s enough of them, they tangle up and trap liquid, thickening the sauce. But some starches work better than others in different applications.

Root starches, such as potato starch, arrowroot, and tapioca, thicken at relatively low temperatures, so although they’re great for pie fillings and clear glazes, they thin out at higher temperatures and don’t fare well when stirred. Therefore, they are not the wisest choice for gravies. That leaves flours and cornstarch. One advantage of using flour is that it starts to thicken before reaching a simmer, and if you keep it on a very low simmer the sauce will become smoother. Wheat starch is the most sauce-friendly starch, and the lower the protein the better. That means that cake or pastry flours work best—the resulting gravy will smooth out in half the time. All-purpose flour, a kitchen cupboard staple, is fine too, but don’t use bread or whole wheat flour. And remember, sauces thickened with flour continue to thicken a bit as they cool, so don’t make them too thick to begin with.

Cornstarch comes from the endosperm (the central portion) of the corn kernel. It’s commonly used as a thickener and because it has the tendency to form lumps, is typically mixed with cold water to form a paste before being added to a hot mixture. Sauces thickened with cornstarch will be clear, as opposed to those thickened with flour, which will be opaque.

Roux Rules of Thumb

A roux isn’t picky about the liquid it thickens; it only cares about how much of it there