I found a recipe for this pub sauce on My Tartare.

Pub Sauce is a reduction that you can use as a demi-glace, a flavor agent, or even as a steak sauce. In other words, you can use it as a sauce or in a sauce, in a stew or salad dressing, or spoon a small bit of it directly onto anything from a steak to a burger. It’s versatile.

My favorite way to use it is in a pan sauce or gravy. There are days when deglazing a pan gives you a couple spoons full of heaven, or when your roasted chicken renders juices so delicious that you almost forget about the rest of the meal. There are other days when this doesn’t happen, and you find yourself reaching for something – anything – to make up for the perplexing lack of flavor. Pub sauce is your friend in both scenarios. Add it to something that already tastes good, and imbue it with depth and complexity. Add it to something that needs flavor, and it does the job. The batch that I made when testing this recipe, I used in mac & cheese, meatballs, on some Denver steaks, and then I froze the rest in tablespoon-sized cubes.

It takes a while to prepare, but a lot of the time is spent sitting around, waiting for things to happen. In the end, you wind up with what looks like a very small amount of sauce for all your trouble, but it’s so intense that you wind up using it by the teaspoon or tablespoonful, so you actually get a lot.

Pub Sauce seeping across a Denver steak

What you need to make about 3/4 cup:

1 Tbs shallot, minced
½ cup white onion (or some other less racist onion), small dice
1 Tbs olive oil
2 tsp peppercorn melange
⅛ tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp roasted garlic
1 tsp sugar
3 Tbs red wine vinegar
1 cup Sauvignon Blanc
½ cup Marsala
½ cup Blue Moon (or another Belgian beer)
⅛ tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp thyme leaves
1 small bay leaf
2 cups chicken stock
¾ teaspoon salt

Abbreviated Directions (for the full directions – as well as much more beautiful pictures than mine – see My Tartare):

Blanch the shallot and then fry it up a little with the onion. Add peppers and garlic. Add sugar. Add vinegar. Add alcohols, Worcestershire, thyme, and bay; reduce. Add stock and salt; reduce. Strain.

Notes:

• Derek’s recipe makes considerable use of a chinois. Many years of half-way paying attention in French class led me to believe that this meant he had a Chinese sous chef who was doing most of the work for him, but it turns out that a chinois is nothing more than a conical, fine-mesh sieve. My sieve looks kind of like an inverted baseball cap, so I’ve decided to refer to it as a japonais.
• If you don’t have any roasted garlic, you’re going to have to start this recipe by roasting some. That’s going to add a considerable amount of time, although it can be done many days in advance. And, like the pub sauce recipe itself, the time it takes to roast garlic is mainly spent sitting around, waiting for it to get roasted. That makes this the perfect recipe to tackle when you’re binging on Game of Thrones.
• You’re going to have a lot of roasted garlic leftover, but you know what? You should actually roast two heads, so that you have a veritable shitload of it leftover. Just before starting in on the pub sauce, slice up a large baguette and toast it – but not in a toaster, you cretin. Oil up the slices and bake them until golden and crisp. Then, while you’re making the pub sauce, spread that roasted garlic on the toasts. A little cheese on the side, a few of the other beers from the six-pack you bought for the pub sauce, et voila. You will find yourself wanting to make pub sauce every goddamned night.
• Don’t want to open up a Sauvignon Blanc just to extract a cup? You do know that you’re supposed to finish off the rest of the bottle as you cook, right? But if you’d rather drink beer, use vermouth and reduce the amount by about 1/3.

In My Opinion:

I can make a fairly decent pan sauce, but adding a bit of Pub Sauce to it turns it into something far more interesting: richer, deeper, more sophisticated. Excellent recipe, Derek! I would definitely recommend having a bit of this around.  (5 / 5)

Pub Sauce

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