Page 215 - YC Cooking School

4. Don’t lose any valuable flavours

Once you’ve cooked your duck and poured the fat into a separate bowl, flambé your pan
with alcohol to detach the flavours that are stuck to the bottom of the pan. Pour the resting
juices from the duck breasts into your gastrique sauce as well. These are like little bombs of
flavour and you don’t want to end up chucking them down the drain.

5. Add butter right at the end
Butter gives richness and a beautiful sheen or lustre to a sauce and makes it silky smooth,
so don’t be shy with it. This is especially important in a stock-based sauce.

6. Take care not to split your sauce

Once you’ve added the butter to your sauce, you run the risk of it splitting if it boils for too
long. Watch it like a hawk and stir regularly.

7. Season your sauce
The last step is to season your sauce. Be generous with the pepper, as it’ll help balance the

strong existing flavours of your sauce. At this point you can also get creative and
experiment with different flavour variations such as grapefruit or orange.

A few notes on flambéing

Flambéing is a technique where you deglaze the pan with alcohol and set it alight in the
process. While it may help the alcohol to evaporate more quickly, it has little impact on the
overall flavour and is a technique mostly used to show off a bit! There’s nothing wrong with
wowing your dinner party guests by doing this at home, but take extra care and only use
the alcohol specified in the recipe. If you’re working with gas, stand back and tilt the pan
slightly so that the alcohol catches the flame. If you’re working on an electric stove, you’ll
need to light it with a match. The flambé flame can reach quite high so this is not something
to try in a small kitchen or if you have a fitted extractor fan. If in doubt, just let the alcohol
evaporate without actually setting it alight.

Learn to cook online at learn.yuppiechef.com

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