reducing brown veal stock...

Jeffy -- You didn't get any play on this at all.

IMO and IME(xperience), you're better off holding the stock and fortifying it later. Also, you get much better taste taking the first steps towards concentration steps before adding wine if concentration's in the cards.

BDL

My rule of stock is....

Reduce reduce reduce

Season when you know what your using it for.

Fortify when you know what your using it for.

Do you mean, like, out of the bottle, into the stock? If thats what you mean, then BAD.

:lol:

Not to put to fine a point on it, espangole tastes like sh*t. As far as I know, it's only legitimate use since the beginning of the 20th Century is as a mere; it has no independent use.

Just free associating and flying on memory, but the closest finished derivative sauce to espagnole is a chasseur.

If you've got the time and can afford to waste the stock, it's probably worth going through the process all the way to, say, a butter finished bordelaise to see if you like the differences. In some ways it's a more flexible product, allowing longer holds, easier thinning if it over thickens, and so on.

Clarity is less good, than building a sauce with glace viande, but you can get as much, if not more luster, with sieving (at the appropriate points in the process), and the previously mentioned butter finish.

I do a sort of 3/4 espagnole you might want to try:

Saute 1 cup of mirepoix in 1 tsp olive oil plus 2 tbs butter, until jit shows some color. Push it to the side of the pan, and add 1 tbs of tomato paste to the center of the pan. The paste will form a fond after a minute or so. Move the mirepoix back to the center of the pan, and coat it with the paste by stirring or tossing. Keep the contents moving until the paste just begins to darken -- another 2 minutes or most. This, by the way, is called a pincage. Sprinkle 2 tbs of flour over the pincage and cook, stirring frequently, until the raw is off the flour, about 2 minutes (you can smell it). Reduce the heat to medium-low, and continue cooking the flour another five minutes, stirring frequently as the flour toasts and the tomato browns. (Now it's a roux-pincage.) Add about 1/2 cup of veal stock, raise the heat to medium-high and deglaze. Add another Add 6 cups of veal stock, bring to a boil, and reduce to a simmer. Add a bay leaf and about 10 stems worth of parsley (if you use a sachet add a little thyme too). Reduce by about one third (to 1 qt liquiid). Fine sieve through cheesecloth or a tami, pressing the essence out of the mirepoix. (And this is the quick way!)

To make a pint of demi glace, mix two cups of half-as*ed espagnole with two cup sof veal stock. Reduce slowly by one half. Add a shot of madeira, simmer an additional five minutes, and remove from heat. If you want to use the demi as a sauce on its own -- which would have Escoffier rolling over in his grave, but is perfectly legit in my book -- sieve and butter finish (in either order) before serving. Both procedures add considerable visual gloss, and the butter puts a protein sheen on the diner's lips.

Go forth and on to the derivatives,
BDL

I'd reduce it all to "glace" cool it, cut it in cubes, wrap, freeze, & pull out when you need to boost the flavor of something. Nice to have around & doesn't take up too much space.

I'm sorry if I talked you out of it.

IMO, most "brown sauce" derivatives are a lot better made with an espagnole than with reductions. Also IMO, while flour can certainly be overused, and its overuse is a hallmark of certain kind of bad cooking, it's a mistake to reject flour-structuring completely.

If you think of cooking as being something like painting, you recognize the importance of how flavors are placed in the foreground and background. Some cooking teachers call this "layering." That's what espagnole does. It puts the basic aromatics and structural ingredients in the background. This, in turn, allows the foreground elements of a derivative -- including excellent stock -- sauce to shine through. (This is what Careme and Escoffier meant by calling some sauces "mothers." It wasn't superior taste, or contemporary popularity.)

The only way you'll understand the appropriate place for espagnole in your own repertoire is by using it as Careme, Escoffier and Pelliprat intended. I.e., a basis for derivatives. Reject it if you don't like it, not because you think you have a better use for stock. Of course, yours is already partially reduced. Maybe next time you make brown stock you'll hold some back and make a quart.

BDL

Jeff,

I don't think there's any harm. If there was, all the gooey-paste stock shortcuts like "Better Than Bullion" would be out of business. So, as far as I know anyway, you could reconstitute if you're in a hurry to fool around with the things you can do with stock. (Is that why you reduced it right off the bat?)

On the other hand, there's no hurry. You'll make stock again.

BDL