After watching several shows and reading a few recipes, I decided to try making my own demi-glace. Demi-glace is a rich brown sauce in French cuisine used by itself or as a base for other sauces. It is traditionally made by combining equal parts of veal stock and sauce espagnole, the latter being one of the five mother sauces of classical French cuisine, and the mixture is then simmered and reduced by half. I have seen recipes which say you can make it in 4 hours and then some say 12 hours or more. I kinda screwed up with the quantity of veal stock so I ended up having to make the stock twice (the second roasting/simmering is called a remouillage, so it took about 14 hours. In the end, I had a zip lock bag of ice-cube size frozen demi-glace hunks.
10 lbs. of veal bones (I found these at Penn-Dutch):
After roasting the bones for about an hour:
Paint the bones with tomato paste:
Cover with chopped mirepoix and roast for another 45 minutes:
Remove the bones to a stock pot and deglaze the pan with dry red wine:
After simmering and skimming for hours, the veal stock/brown stock is reduced:
Strain out all the impurities and gunk:
Now making the sauce espagnole, start with a brown roux:
Then add more fresh mirepoix, some of the brown stock, a bouquet garni, and let it simmer also. Then combine the sauce espagnole with the brown sauce and let it reduce and cool.
This was adapted from Emeril Lagasse's recipe, but I found it to be too confusing. Next time I'll find a clearer recipe.
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