Sauces are another secret to making your food taste more like a restaurant, but you don’t need to memorize classic French and Italian mother sauces to pull this off. A basic pan sauce is not only delicious, it’s helpful to clean-up!
Pan sauces start with deglazing, which really just means adding some flavorful liquid to a hot and dirty pan (like the one you just used to sear, above). Adding liquid releases the flavorful cooked-on bits of food (this makes cleaning the pan easier) and then you have pan juices to build a sauce from. From here you can add a bit of minced shallot or some fresh herbs for flavor. Then, off the heat, add fridge-cold butter, swirling and swirling the butter into the liquid until it thickens. Pour this pan sauce over the steak you just seared and you’ve got a restaurant-quality dish—and a nearly-clean pan.
