How to make a Beurre blanc

The Staff Canteen

Hello for this video we're going to show you how to make a classic Beurre blanc sauce, so we're going to start with some chopped shallots finely diced shallots and get our pan on a reasonably high heat, shallots are going to go in and here I've got 125 mills of white wine vinegar and 125 mills of white wine, different recipes vary slightly as to whether it’s vinegar and water, vinegar and wine, just vinegar, I quite like the 50/50 balance but I quite like the 50/50 balance.

So in our pan now we've got the shallots, the white wine, the white wine vinegar and all we have to do now is bring that up to the boil and reduce it down until you've got about two or three full tablespoon’s, so the liquid is now reduced down until the pan is almost dry, you've just got a couple tablespoonful’s of liquid left in there and we’re going to start whisking in our butter just to form an emulsion, so I’ve got 250 grams of unsalted butter here and I'm going to start with 8 or 9 cubes of butter and just work on and off heat, you don't want this to boil now that you started out doing the butter because we are going is form a emulsion between the butter and the liquid, so whisking well and this will take this whole packet of butter and I think one of the key things with the Beurre blanc because it is a butter a sauce and the butter is the key ingredient or one of the key ingredients is the quality of the ingredients so really, really good quality unsalted butter, good vinegar and you shouldn't have too many problems.

So we've now incorporated all our butter, whisked all the butter into the sauce and I hope you can see that we've got a nice, nice thin cream consistency, it’s not at all split it’s nicely emulsified and now it's really a question of seasoning, it’s quite a sharp sauce depending on what you're serving it with, if you need to a little pinch of sugar just to take the acidity, but because this is unsalted butter it will need a reasonable amount of seasoning and then that's a really versatile butter source that you use with fish, you can use it with chicken and you can flavour in lots of different ways.

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The Staff Canteen

The Staff Canteen

Editor 9th March 2017

How to make a Beurre blanc