Thanksgiving Pan Sauce

This post is a direct continuation of my previous post on how to ake a Thanksgiving turkey, although this method works for any poultry—or any meat (a steak, a roast, chops, etc.). Making a pan sauce is a simple and effective way of getting maximum flavor and utility out of your meat or poultry, and yet few home cooks know how to do this, and even fewer do it well. In the current lingo, doing this will instantly “level up” the flavor of your dish and its perceived complexity (and thus your perceived competence as a chef) to all your guests.

Move your turkey (or chicken or beef or whatever you’re working with—just don’t do this with fish) to a platter to rest and take the vegetables in the bottom of the roasting pan with it. Transfer any liquid there might be in the roasting tray somewhere else and reserve it. (Please don’t throw this liquid away; doing so will make all the effort meaningless.)

After you move everything out of the roasting tray, you should be left only with a roasting tray with some fond in it—tiny sticky bits of poultry/meat and vegetables that got stuck to the roasting tray and got caramelized. We want to dissolve this eventually, so it becomes part of our pan sauce, but before we do that, we need to make a roux. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are different colors of roux attained by cooking the mixture of flour and fat (almost always butter, as in this case) for different lengths of time. For this, we need a white roux—one part flour to one part butter (about 2½ tablespoons each) cooked together until a paste forms but without developing any color, just until the raw flour smell gets cooked off. Whisk the roux constantly so it doesn’t burn, and so the fond in the bottom of the pan doesn’t burn either.

Once the roux has formed and the raw smell has been cooked off, keep whisking, but now reintroduce the reserved liquid that used to be in the roasting tray. This will deglaze the pan, i.e., it will lift off those caramelized bits and dissolve them into solution in the pan sauce, flavoring and seasoning it. Bring this to a boil and then back it down to a simmer to activate the thickening power of the roux. Depending on how much liquid the cooking process generated and how much the roux thickened/reduced it, you may want to adjust the consistency of this sauce by adding more liquid. As with the mother sauces, the objective is to make the sauce thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. If the sauce is too thick, add more chicken stock and continue whisking until you are happy with the consistency. If the sauce is too thin, keep reducing it. Check for seasoning and adjust as necessary.