How To Make A Butter Sauce

So, today, I'm going to show you how to make a butter sauce. It's called a beurre blanc, which goes really well with fish, so a bit of grilled cod or pan-fried lemon sole, it goes beautifully with that. I've got one shallot which I'm going to chop in a moment, and a little bit of lemon, some unsalted butter, it's important that it is unsalted because otherwise, the final sauce is just impossible to eat because it's too salty.

And I've got a little bit of white wine vinegar, so about a tablespoon and a half of white wine vinegar. And the first thing I'm going to do is show you how to chop up a shallot finely. Cut the shoot end off rather than the root end.

And then, cut through lengthwise down the shallot, take off the paper from the outside, the papery skin bit, and then using a big knife like this, you hold your fingers in kind of a claw shape and let the knife touch that middle fingernail which then guides the knife where goes. Do some very fine slices of shallot and then turn it round and we do a rolling chop. The tip of the knife stays on the board, and fingers in the same shape, and just slice the other way.

The shallots are then put into a saucepan with the white wine vinegar and a little bit of water just to help get some flavor out of the shallot into the liquid. And then, we'll take it over to the heat, warm it up so that we can get some more flavor into the liquid, and then we'll strain it and that's called making a reduction. So, you've chopped your butter into small cubes and then you're going to take the reduction which has reduced by about half so you've got about a tablespoon of liquid left.

Sieve it all out. Just get a spoon to scrape out the rest of the shallot. And then you put your reduction back into your pan, grab a little sauce whisk and your butter, and then we'll go to the oven and whisk the butter in.

So I've put one lump of butter in and I'm just going to whisk that in over a low heat until the butter's all melted into the sauce. Take another lump and keep on doing this until all the butter has been added to the sauce. And the action of whisking and the addition of fat help to thicken the sauce.

Just keep taking it off the heat if it's getting too hot because that will make it split. So I've nearly whisked all the butter in. I've got just one more lump to add and it's really nice and thick, the sauce.

It should be about the consistency of single cream. Whisk that last lump of butter in just over a low heat. Sometimes, if it looks very greasy, it means that it might be starting to flip so if you think that's the case, take it off the heat, add a drop of cold water, and that should bring it back together again.

So, you've got all the butter in and a nice thick sauce and then you ought taste the sauce and see what the balance of flavors is like. If you'd like to serve it with fish, make it nice and lemony. Or you could serve it with boiled artichoke or asparagus - that would be good as well but a good amount of lemon juice because it cuts through the oiliness of the butter.

You could also put some herbs in here like tarragon, dill, chives, anything like that, just to make it a little bit more interesting. Taste it again. And that's how to make butter sauce. .