The Ultimate Tangy Sauce for Grilled Pork: A Bistrot Classic

So last time I did mention we're gonna be making an extra video and I thought making a bistro sauce was a great idea because we haven't covered sauces for quite some time. So quick reminder what is a bistro? Picture on the screen there are these Parisian cafes where you sit with the terrace, you can have lunch, coffee, croissant, dinner, whatever you want and watch the world go by. And the spirit of the bistro is these casual types of food. I mean it is the classic French food that doesn't take too long to make. The sauce hachée, meaning the finely chopped sauce, is the one we're going to be doing today. It is a tangy sauce that is specifically designed to be served with grilled and roast pork. You can serve it with beef but pork is the way to go. It is an interesting sauce because it's very tangy and you're going to have of course a base of demi-glace on which I've got a video link in the video description. But it's based on onions, shallots, capers, gherkins and vinegar with a hint of mushroom and tomato. So that tanginess goes very well with the grilled pork. It's going to be really interesting. And by the way, I need to show you that pan. So what is going on here? Another copper pan. Looks exactly similar to the frying pan I showed last time. Cast iron handle, the Mauvielle full copper. But this is a very cute and small pan, 14 centimeters only. And you may wonder what is the use of that pan? Well, small pans are actually super useful for certain things, especially small batches. You want to make a caramel in a little bit, maybe a chocolate sauce. You want to make something with cream. You want to finish off a sauce. You start with a big pan, you reduce, you filter, then you put it in this and you add the final touches. And now for the ingredients, I did mention it was a tangy sauce to serve with pork. But I'm not lying. Imagine this. You get onions, the shallots. You get the gherkins, the capers, the vinegar. And the name sauce sachet means the thinly chopped kind of sauce because everything is thinly chopped. Okay, so we're going to thinly chop the onion, the shallot, the capers, everything. Make a duxelle of mushrooms. And we even have a finish of ham. This is for the last bit. And a hint of tomato as well. So it's going to be a very, very interesting sauce. Remember, you're going to need to have either a reduced thickened stock, a brown stock for that sauce, or a homestyle demi-glace, which is the one I show you in the video. I repeat this again. The link is in the video description. Don't miss that because you're going to need this to make the sauce. So make that stock for that demi-glace before you even start making this. Now I'm going to chop everything and let you see how it looks like. So once you've done with your mise en place, it looks something like this. Everything has been measured and you'll find all the details on the recipe link in the video description. Now for the technicalities of that sauce, it happens in two stages. The first thing we're going to do is a reduction in vinegar where we're going to be cooking the onion with the shallot and the mushrooms. We're going to add the vinegar and reduce this by half. Sometimes this is called a gastric. We're then going to add the sauce base, which is the demi-glace and the brown stock has been thickened nice and gelatinous, with the tomato and do another reduction. These things here are the finishing touches. This is only at the end that we're going to add a little bit of ham, a little bit of capers, a little bit of gherkin, a touch of parsley, and that is going to be it. The sauce will be ready. Now just before we start, I'd like to mention something that you may have noticed in my mise en place is that, for instance, the shallots that I've got here are diced and there's a difference between dicing and chopping. So the sauce ache means that everything is chopped. So when I'm dicing like this and you think, oh that's okay. No, it's not okay. This is not ache. Ache is this. So you're going to go and you're going to give your little dicing or thinly diced a nice cross chop like this to make sure you really, really have that kind of fine grain kind of result. Okay, so your onions and your shallots, you want something like that. Perfect. So now that we have the proper ache technique, everything is really thinly chopped, we can start the sauce. We're going to use our little pan. You can use something slightly bigger if you want. And all what we're going to do is to take the butter and let it melt on a medium heat. As soon as the butter is melting, we're now going to add a mixture of onion, shallots, and mushroom. By the way, the mushroom is optional. If you don't like mushroom, you can not add the mushroom. It's not a problem. And we're going to use a really almost a low heat, medium, medium low, no coloration. And we're going to leave this to cook very gently without coloration for a good five minutes because we really want to try to cook these onions properly. Now, five minutes is really the minimum time if you have the good pan and everything is really, really thinly chopped. And I'm doing this because I want to keep a slight crunch into the onions and the shallot because it's kind of a pickling sauce, right? It's a pickle sauce. You want a bit of crunch. You don't want like a mush. But if you want, you can extend the cooking of the onions and the shallots, everything all the way to 10 minutes to have something properly cooked. So I'm done here. And what we're going to do from here is just add the vinegar, about a hundred mil, raise the heat, bring this to a boil and then reduce by half. Perfect. So my vinegar reduction here is coming to a boil. I'm going to keep it to a light boil, not a raging boil. And what does it mean reducing by half? It's a bit abstract. So I'm going to go, I'm going to put my timer on and I'll let you know when it's ready, how much time I spent. You see, that's too much boil. I'm going to reduce slightly. So just a medium heat. And there we go. So it took me about three, three and a half minutes of reduction. And this is what we've got. So plenty of vinegar in there. And here we're going to be adding now, the sauce bases have warmed up. I always like to filter it another time. Another tomato. Very simple. And we're going to mix the whole lot. And look at this, it starts to take shape. Okay. Now we're going to bring this to the boil. And again, we're going to go for a reduction for, you know, maybe a good five minutes or something like this on a medium heat. For the reduction part of the sauce, you can count five minutes. It really depends to, you know, to you and how thicker you want to have it, how concentrate the taste. But the most important, you see, you don't want to use a raging boil and you got these starting to form at one of these like impurities and excess of fat that you can remove. So I've on the side with cold water, and I'm going to start to, that's coming from the tomato as well. And we're going to start to clean the sauce as it reduced to have something nice. Now the amount of tomato sauce I've used, the Escoffier measurement is quite heavy on tomato. You can do it with a little bit less. If you want it less red, it's fine. I think this is just all the fat there. So after five, six or more minutes of reduction, your sauce or your sauce base here is pretty much ready. You can see the bubbles on here. I'm much kind of thicker. Okay. And we have the spoon coating consistency. That means it is ready. So let me turn the heat off for a bit. So here we are. I turn my heat off. This is the sauce and look at all the texture in there. There's all the chopped stuff we have, the onions, the shallot. Let me taste. Whoa, tangy. Oh, I like that. Really that kind of vinegar sauce with the tomato in the background. A slight crush of the onion and shallot, but honestly it's perfect. And there's no mention of salt and pepper. So I think you can add a hint of salt, a tiny bit. And if you want some black pepper, but remember, we still need to add the final garnish. Now, why did I turn the heat off here? Because it is important to keep in mind that the garnish should be added only, okay, only just before you serve the sauce. So if you intend to use the sauce later, like me, I'm going to grill some pork chops. They're not ready yet. I'm going to leave the sauce like that. I'm not going to add the garnish. Okay. Because this is the last thing you want to do. If you add the garnish now in a warm sauce, the gherkin, the ham, the capers, everything's going to start to cook. It's going to really lose that wow factor and that freshness and same goes for the parsley. So the big thing here, if you make that sauce in advance, go to that stage, leave it on the stove, cover it. And you can wait for hours until it's ready. When your meat is ready, you're about to serve, you warm it up. We're going to put the addition of ham, gherkins, capers, et cetera. And then we're going to serve this over the meat. So let me grill a pork chop and then we'll serve. I've got the grill and I'm just going to put a nice pork chop on there. So there we have it. Imagine the scenario. I was waiting for my pork chop to be grilled. It looks nice and ready. So now I'm going to warm up my sauce slightly, add the garnish and I'm going to serve. I've got my sauce. It's time to serve. I'm going to add a grind of black pepper in there. And in terms of temperature, you can warm up the sauce, but it's not the type of sauce that you want to serve ultra hot because it's very tangy. So it reminds me this kind of barbecue sauce that you could almost serve kind of lukewarm and it doesn't need to be boiling hot. And from here is the final touches. So we've got gherkin. It's up to you, up to a one or two teaspoon, a bit of that. It's going to have some tanginess. We're going to have the capers in here. Of course the ham. So I'm not going to add too much. You see all these chopped things and to finish the touch of parsley. So imagine all these extra ingredients in there. That's quite something. And all that we're going to do is a little stir, stir a whole lot. I'm going to bring this to temperature and that's it. Immediately we're What I want to show here, sorry, but the naked presentation is really just the sauce. And the sauce, the name, look at this. It's the texture. Can you see the texture? You see all these little bits of goodness in here? That is the spirit of the sauce. And you know, really you can put sauce on this. You know, there's not a problem and you want to be generous. And I like these dishes with lots of sauce. I'm going to drench this in sauce in here and we're going to have a bite. There's a big piece of fatty meat on here. You can maybe start with that. Now look at this. That's a good angle. You see that layer of sauce? I'm going to add some more. It's really all these pieces of goodness I've got here. And you got that layer. You see so when I cut a piece, then you can see what's going on. You got the meat, you got all that sauce in there. And it's actually not like a tomato. It's nice to become a bit brown. That sauce actually goes really, really well with pork. And look at this angle here. You can add more sauce. And I love that texture. It is so different than the kind of sauce you always find. And just dig in, cut, and you got all this, you know, this tanginess in there. But not too much. It's just enough. It's beautiful. What a tangy sauce and all this texture. I love this Escoff. I think it's always something new. So the sauce hachée, remember, it means the chopped sauce with all this little texture. You bite into the capers, the gherkin, and the pieces of ham. It goes beautifully with pork. I've tried here a grilled pork chop. But if you make a barbecue roast pork, it will be fine. Remember, Bistro Classic, it's not a pan sauce. It's a stand-alone sauce. And you can make it in advance, which is great. Just do not add the garnish too early. Wait for the last minute for the wow factor. For the rest, we're going to resume next week our cycle of starter main desserts. So we're going to go back to the beginning and we're going to do a starter once again, so you know what's coming. And I've got some news on the Patreon side as well. If you want to support us on Patreon, we've got a new tier that's going to allow you to watch our videos in 4k, totally ad-free if you can't stand the ads anymore. And you can also join our French cooking club with more than 700 members where you can interact directly with me, got your question and answer, send your pictures, do all kinds of interesting things. But discover this thing, links will be in the description. I'll see you all next week for another French cooking video. As always, take care.