Technique: Deglazing

This is what we came up with at Food Lab 2:

Whatever your meat is, scallopini it.


Heat about 1 Tbsp. of butter in a heavy skillet

Lots of recipes tell you to go half-and-half with olive oil, but don't.  All butter is better. Just keep an eye on it so it doesn't burn.


Sear your meat 1 min each side and remove to a hot plate

Too rare?  No way - and remember that it's going to keep cooking once you get it off the fire.

Toss in 1-2 Tbsp. finely minced allium

Which one?  As we discovered, whatever you have on hand (shallots, onions, leeks, scallions, garlic, whatever) - but the KEY is that it be finely minced.


Deglaze with cheap red wine or brandy 

How much?  Enough to get the fond up from the pan.  A few Tbsp. up to 1/2 c.

Add your stock

You do have good homemade stock handy, right?  How much?  Well, how many people are you feeding and how thick do you want the sauce?  The more you reduce, the thicker the sauce.

Strain the sauce through a chinois

You don't have to strain the sauce, but it's a nice touch.

Pour the sauce over the meat and enjoy!

Food Lab 2: Deglazing

On Sunday, May 16, Chef Spouse and I headed to Virginia to Mad Kitchen Scientist & the Executive Committee's house for our second food lab.  Papa and Mama IA by Day-Chef by Night couldn't join us because The Spawn decided to make her appearance several weeks earlier than planned.  Welcome Spawn!

Anyway, we had a GIANT tenderloin of beef, an equally GIANT tenderloin of pork, an entire duck, various alliums, beef stock, and a plan:  to discover the BEST way to to deglaze and create a pan sauce.

This time, we decided to be a little more systematic, so the Executive Committee set us up a spreadsheet to record the results of our experiments.

After taking some time over cheese, bread, pate and mint juleps to plan our afternoon, we quickly realized that we had WAY more meat than we could possibly use - and really, we definitely SHOULD not eat that much all in one day.  We decided to reserve the pork tenderloin for another application and stick with the beef.

Mad Kitchen Scientist quickly fabricated a pile of 1/4 lb. beef scallopini for fast cooking, we pulled the beef stock cubes out of the freezer, and we began:

Test 1:  butter versus olive oil
Winner:  butter, no contest

Test 2:  good wine versus cheap wine for deglazing
Winner: surprisingly, the cheap wine.  The flavors were brighter.  Which was a good thing, because we wanted to drink the good wine (Fritz Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley, Vintage 2006, and damn, was it yummy).

Test 3: cheap red wine versus brandy
Winner:  no clear winner.  Both were good, and we decided you'd want to choose based on what else you were planning to make.

Test 4:  alliums - shallots versus onions
Winner:  we all expected the shallots to win, and what we discovered was that it really didn't matter, as long as the allium in question was very finely diced.

Test 5: allium - garlic plus onion versus garlic alone
Winner:  garlic plus onion.  Delish pan sauce resulted.

But what about the duck?

Glad you asked.

We did one test:  white wine versus brandy
Winner:  again, no clear winner.  The brandy sauce was nutty and warm - a fall/winter duck.  The white wine sauce was very fresh and bright - a spring duck.

Important kitchen tip?  Brandy + duck fat = flash pan fire.  Be careful.

And then, Mad Kitchen Scientist lived up to his name with the other duck breast, creating something we named May Duck, which recipe I will post separately.

So what did we learn? Doing really good beef as a quick saute scallopini in butter is AWESOME.  After that, it's really up to you...

Technique: Scrambled Eggs

Prep a double boiler

Whisk 3 large eggs, 1 Tbsp. heavy cream, and 1/2 tsp. of salt

Alton Brown, aka The Boss of Us, recommends scrambling eggs in a double boiler to provide continuous low heat, and he's right - this does result in awesomely delicious scrambled eggs, but is a mess to clean up - man, does the egg stick to the bowl.

Anyway, more on that in a minute.


Once you've poured your whisked eggs and cream into your double boiler, use a flexible silicon spatula to scrape them up continuously until they achieve the desired degree of doneness.

The faster you scrape, the smoother texture your eggs will have.  As far as doneness?  It's a matter of taste, but you need to remove the eggs from the heat a little runny for your taste because the hot eggs will continue to cook off the heat.

To go over the top? Smear a little goat cheese on the hot eggs.

A few notes:

Chef Spouse has tried a variety of options to make the cleanup a little easier.  The type of bowl does not seem to make a difference.  A little browned butter in the bottom improves the flavor, but does not help with the cleanup either.

And of course, the downside of using a double boiler is that you have to hold the bowl, and it's hard to hold still, because the steam comes up and hits your arm.

Chef Spouse realized that the key is that your pan cannot have any sharp edges where something might collect, which will wreck the texture. So you can skip the double boiler if you have a good heavy weight saucier pan and a cooking surface with consistent and easily adjustable temperature.  In other words, an All-Clad saucier on low to med-low on a Viking gas range obviates the need for the double boiler.

Chef Spouse is constitutionally disinclined to nonstick pans, but he loves making scrambled eggs this way so much he's considering getting one.

Technique: Poached Eggs

As with most cooking techniques, we base our findings on Alton Brown, with a few changes.

Break a fresh egg into a small bowl or ramekin


Bring water to a boil in a saucepan

We generally do a smallish saucepan and do one egg at a time

Add green herbs

Tarragon is awesome and classic, but anything that's not an oily herb - like rosemary - and that you like with eggs would work.  Use more than you think - we generally use several large sprigs.

Shut off the water and add 1 Tbsp. of white vinegar per cup of water in the pan

This is quite a bit more vinegar than most recipes call for, but we found, in testing the amounts, that this quantity produced the best results in egg texture.

As soon as the water settles, tilt the pan and pour the egg gently into the side towards where the pan is tilted.  Keep the pan tilted until the egg starts to set up.

The water cannot be moving AT ALL when the egg goes in.  We found that this method is more sure than the traditional swirl the water and drop the egg in the center, because if you miss with that, it makes a mess - and it's easy to miss.

After 3 minutes, remove the egg using a slotted spoon and serve.