While this might seem intimidating, a little experimenting might surprise you. It doesn’t take too long or have too many ingredients. Give it a go.
Ingredients:
- White wine
- Shallots
- Peppercorns
- Vinegar – plain distilled
- Lemon zest
- Butter, cold
- Cayenne pepper
- Lemon juice
A more contemporary French sauce called beurre blanc is a white butter sauce. To make a beurre blanc, you need to start with a reduction. Add some white wine to a hot pan and then add some shallots and a few peppercorns to the wine. Then, add some vinegar, using about twice as much wine as vinegar. Add some lemon zest as well. Let the liquid in the pan reduce until it’s nearly dry—à sec—and once it’s reduced, strain out the solids and put it into another pan to build the beurre blanc.
After the liquid has reduced, bring the contents of the pan up to a boil. Then, turn the heat down, add butter—piece by piece—and season with salt. You want the butter to stay emulsified and creamy, so use cold butter. You don’t want the butter to boil because boiling over time will make the sauce break, so you want the heat to be high enough that the butter is melting but not boiling. You want this mixture to become a thick, creamy sauce.
If you had started with red wine instead of white wine, you would have what is known as a beurre rouge, or red butter sauce. You could have even added citrus juice to your reduction and made a butter sauce that tasted of grapefruit, lime, or orange, for example.
Finally, taste and season the sauce. You might want to add more salt, but black pepper is probably not appropriate because it’s a white sauce. Even white pepper might be a little too dark, so add just a pinch of cayenne pepper instead. This is a sauce, so it should taste a little sharp. Add some lemon juice to brighten it up. If the sauce coats the back of a spoon when you dip a spoon into it, that’s indicative of a well-made sauce. French culinarians refer to the coating of the spoon as nappé.
Once the sauce is made, you need to make sure that it stays warm—but not too hot. In a restaurant, chefs might put it into a thermos to keep it hot. You can also keep it warm on the stove. Kept warm, the sauce will last very well for about an hour.
Serve the beurre blanc with a pan-fried chicken breast. Spoon some of the sauce on top of the chicken, letting it pool on the plate just a little bit. Sprinkle some fennel tops over the chicken as well.
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