Red wine or Bordelaise sauce

In any serious conversation about French cuisine, we quickly come to sauces. They are the true pillars of this cuisine and the French pay extremely great attention to them. And not only in top restaurants and bistros but also in every French home. Recipes are devoutly passed down from generation to generation, and this chronology often goes back several centuries.

A special group of sauces consists of les sauces mères – 5 main French sauces that every cook should know and be able to prepare. They are, in order - Béchamel sauce, Velouté sauce, Espagnole sauce, Hollandaise sauce and tomato sauce. It is widely believed that they are the basis for all other sauces - sweet and savory - that are prepared worldwide.

But, along with them, there is a whole series of other French sauces – richer and lighter, simple or more elaborate, which enrich the French, but now also global gastronomic everyday life. One of them is definitely Bordelaise sauce, better known as red wine sauce.

It is a classic French sauce that, as the name suggests, is made from wine from the region around Bordeaux, in the southeast of France. It is rich and full of flavor, so it will raise a simple grilled steak or slow-roasted beef to a completely new level. In addition to meat, it goes perfectly with baked potatoes.

Although the traditional recipe calls for a few deciliters of Bordeaux, and since it is one of the most expensive wines in the world, any other quality wine that you would normally drink will also work - cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot... The only rule that applies here is - the better wine you use, the better and tastier your sauce will be.

There are numerous variations of the Bordelaise sauce, the key ingredients being red wine and shallots. Some recipes also call for veal stock, bone marrow or demi-glace, and some a combination of all of these. However, like almost all French sauces, this one also requires considerable dexterity and skill in preparation, and also a lot of time.

All this, with the same effect of a fantastic, rich sauce with deep aromas, you can save if you choose ready-made Bordelaise sauce, i.e. Home Chef Red Wine Sauce, which is currently on discount in all Harisa Spice Store stores and on our website.

Trust us, when you serve it with a selected piece of meat, none of your guests will tell that hours of sauteing, reducing and mixing are not behind its layered taste.