3 September 2013

Lekker: Let's Talk About Sauces: Blue Cheese Sauce

I've always been a gravy girl. As a little kid I would beg and plead with my Mom to let me eat the gravy from a roast chicken or a pot roast--that and nothing else. Those who know me well know to double their gravy portions for a dish if I'm coming over. I don't know why I love it so much, but that same strange obsession expanded into other types of sauces as I got older and explored more. Sauces seriously should be their own food group.

Soooo, over the next couple of days I'm going to be sharing a few of my favourite sauce recipes while I work on batches of other things.

Sidebar: the more I type it the weirder the word "sauce" looks, and sounds in my head. I once forgot how to properly say the word "vegetables" because I repeated it an incorrect way over and over in my head. I can't find the clip on YouTube, but the bottom line is that it's Tigger's fault. The bouncy jerk from Winnie-the-Pooh, him.

Anyhoodles, this recipe is for the most idiot-proof, simplistic and most delicious blue cheese sauce I've EVER come across. I am not at all exaggerating when I say that a fight once broke out at a dinner party over who would get to lick the pan after I made this. Previously, I had also smacked a dear friend with a wooden spoon (hard) because he licked the spoon before I could. (Brat.)

I always serve this dripping over some simply sauteéd pork chops, but it works just as fantastically over a steak too. It's amazing as a drizzle over some roasted veggies if that's your thing. Or just through a straw. Whatever. I'm not here to judge.

Baller Blue Cheese Sauce
the amount of blue cheese you decide to use will determine how much sauce you have, so just eyeball it depending on how many people/pork chops you have

What You Need
1 cup of higher quality crumbled blue cheese, or Gorgonzola, if that's what you can find (I'm not saying "higher quality" to be a food snob here, but in my experience, the store brands are really shitty dried-out chalky shams of what blue cheese should be--so go to the deli or imported cheese section to find something slightly better. With cheese, as with men, never settle!)
~3 tablespoons heavy cream (No, you may not substitute half-and-half here to make it "healthier"--this is a sauce MADE OF CHEESE, what are you doing. Stop it with that.)
Freshly ground black pepper

Seriously, that's it.

What You Do
As I said, I usually use this with pork chops, so after I'm done sauteéing those and they're staying warm somewhere else, in the empty pan with all the lovely pan drippings in it (drained of fat though) throw in the cheese over very low heat. Add the heavy cream and stir constantly with a wooden spoon until the cheese is nicely melted. (Employ aforementioned wooden spoon to smack grabby hands away from dipping in to "just taste".) Use the heavy cream to adjust the consistency of the sauce. If you seriously need me to explain that to you, it means add more cream if you prefer it runnier, and cook it down slightly if you like it thicker.  Add black pepper to taste and just TRY to avoid inhaling all of it before you can spoon it over the chops.


Blue cheese, courtesy of someone named Charlotte Julienne on Google, because I'm fresh out of my own photos of blue cheese lying around. Oddly, when I Google image searched "blue cheese" there were a BUNCH of images of pot. I don't know what's going on in the world of marijuana at the moment, but apparently that's a thing. Blue Cheese Weed. K.

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