How to Make Chicken Sauce

Hello! My name is Shannon Overmiller. I’m the Chef at The Majestic in Old Town Alexandria. Today, I’m demonstrating for you roasted chicken, with chicken dew and a light mixed salad. I would like to demonstrate for you how to make the chicken dew which is a chicken sauce or chicken gravy. This is a very simple method but however, it takes steps and processes to get to the sauce consistency. The first thing you’re going to need is a sauce pot, and if you have any leftover chicken or chicken bones you definitely want to utilize this in the sauce because it just builds flavor and adds layers of flavor. In a sauce pot, you simply take a little butter, a little canola to start the cooking process. Heat that up. Add chicken bones, at this stage you want your pot to be pretty hot. Add chicken bones or pieces of chicken. Saute them until color is achieved. You really want the caramelization on them, a nice way to do this as well. You really want color because of the caramelization, put it into a big hot pan, let that pan heat up. You really want nice, hot pan. Season at this stage with salt and pepper. At every stage in a sauce, it’s imperative to season something, building your layers. I can’t say it enough. Once color is achieved, drain excess fat and re-introduce back into the pot. This would be excellent for the sauce, this part right here. The bottom part is also delicious in a sauce. And always add that into a sauce. That’s the flavor, the caramelization I was speaking of. It’s delicious. So, once your chicken is in there, and then what we want to do, we want to add our vegetables, a mirepoix again which is two parts onions and one part celery, one part carrot. Garlic, herbs, later. At this point you also want to add in a touch of tomato paste. And cook the tomato paste out just to coat. This process probably takes about 15 minutes. And then you want to sauté your tomato paste for a couple of minutes. Once the tomato paste is cooked up, then you start to introduce your liquid to the sauce. Today we’re using, I usually add in a white wine or a red wine, but today I’m just going to demonstrate with the chicken stock which we previously made. And then a touch of veal glace, which is the same process as a chicken stock. However, you use calves’ feet and calves’ hocks. And you can buy that, you have to go to a butcher for that or special order usually from a meat distributor. So this sauce is perfectly well with just chicken stock. It works just as well. This is another way you can do it. Add a little flour to it. Cook the flour out, and that will help thicken your sauce, especially if you’re just using chicken stock. Veal glace is a little bit more gelatinous. So once you cook the flour out, you must cook out the raw in the flour. Now is the time to introduce your liquid which we’ll be using chicken stock. Just to cover. At this stage, you want to bring this up to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. You skim this the whole time, reducing the fat, taking the fat away as you go. At the end of this stage for this, you must taste your sauce throughout the stages. It’s already full of flavor, all ready. So, you imagine after going for an hour, hour and a half, that’s what you want to do. It wants to reduce down to a nice consistency which coats the back of a spoon. The consistency I mean by that is when you take this, you see that it doesn’t coat the back of the spoon. When it’s in the correct consistency, it will stay on the spoon, and you can run your fingers through it, and this sauce will slowly come back together. This is not there yet. While simmering, you want to add/introduce herbs into your sauce, a classic technique which is effective. It is something called a bouquet garni. A bouquet garni is simply a bunch of aromatic herbs, like a flower. How to do this? You take a piece of cheese cloth. I wet it so the strings or the little end pieces don’t get into my food, so it’s pretty wet, just piece of butcher’s twine. In this you want to place your herbs of choice, classically it’s five stems of parsley, and then like six sprigs of thyme, and two sprigs of rosemary, black pepper corns, and garlic if desired, and a bay leaf. It’s not rocket science, just cooking. A little thyme, we already have thyme in there, a little juniper. Whatever herbs you have sitting around, you want to make these flavors jump out at you, you know. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and do different things. Everything is not a recipe. Tie it up. It’s a bit much, you don’t need all this cheese cloth, but take your twine, tie in a loop. Some people like to hang it on the side of this pot with the tie but you strain out the sauce anyway, so it’s just an extra step. And when you’re in the restaurant business or even if you’re cooking at home, you don’t have all that time. So, you eliminate all the unnecessary steps as you can as long as you’re still doing it well. So, that is a bouquet garni. And again let this sauce simmer for about an hour, and this is the beginning stages of a chicken sauce.