De-glaze - Cookery terms de-mystified

De-glaze

When you cook something like meat in a pan or roasting tin you may notice little caramelized bits of goodness sticking to the bottom of the tin.  This is like cooking ‘gold-dust’ and in order to make the most of it and incorporate it into a sauce or gravy you should ideally ‘de-glaze’ the pan.  Effectively all you are doing is cleaning those precious bits away from the pan and incorporating them into liquid for a sauce.

To do this, simply remove most of the cooking fat then add a cup or so of liquid (stock, wine, vegetable cooking juices…or a combination of these) to your hot pan.  Let the liquid sizzle as you gently scrape and gather the bits that have stuck to the pan.  You’ll very quickly find that the pan is ‘clean’, in other words you have de-glazed it.

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