Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Food & Drink

How To Make Rich and Velvety Beurre Rouge

By

Sauces are a great way to elevate just about any dish; add butter to many and you will knock it out of the park. Butter makes everything better. Butter has been used in French cuisine since around the Middle Ages and was once known as the poor people’s fat. We use butter in cooking and baking for the moisture, flavor, and of course, fat content. It helps breads, pastries, and cookies to rise, and gives food a richer texture.

When we talk about texture, we talk about mouthfeel. The way food feels with each and every bite. The use of butter in pastry or other baking recipes is completely different from its use in savory dishes. Savory dishes use butter as an emulsifier, as in a sauce. Sometimes a knob of butter will be added to a dish right before serving. This is to create a rich and silky finish to coat the dish with and to thicken the juices into a quick pan sauce.

Recommended Videos

Related Guides

When just a few pats of butter won’t do for your dish, that is when you can create sauces such as Beurre Blanc, an Herb Sauce, or perhaps you need a Hollandaise or Bearnaise Sauce. The extra steps you take will make your dishes stand out even more. One such sauce is the butter-enriched red wine butter sauce known as Beurre Rouge.

Related

What is Beurre Rouge

Beurre Rouge is a French butter sauce that literally translates to red butter. It was created by accident when a French chef was trying to prepare bearnaise sauce and forgot to add in tarragon and egg yolk. The recipe is the same base as Beurre Blanc but substitutes red wine for white wine. The cooking time will be the same with a red wine reduction and then whisk in the cubes of cold butter. This is a rich sauce that will pair well with most fish and seafood dishes – because of the richness from the red wine, it would be a perfect accompaniment for steak.

When making Beurre Rouge, you should use a dry red wine such as Cabernet Sauvignon or perhaps a Zinfandel. The sauce should be a dark yet rich color of red and you can achieve that by using a young dry red wine. The sauce may trace its origins to classic French cuisine but that doesn’t mean you can’t enhance the flavors by introducing additional fresh herbs or spices.

Beurre Rouge Sauce Recipe Variations

Try out any combination of flavors in your sauce or you can give these classics a try.

  • Fresh parsley, fresh thyme, and fresh oregano
  • Fresh tarragon for a salmon or veal dish
  • Fresh garlic and a mix of fresh herbs
  • Fresh rosemary and garlic
  • Use pomegranate in place of the red wine for an alcohol-free beurre rouge sauce.

How to Make Beurre Rouge

Beurre Rouge Recipe

steak with beurre rouge sauce, potatoes, and green beans.
Photo by Andreas Steidlinger on Scopio

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces of red wine
  • 1.5 ounces of dry red wine vinegar
  • 1 ounce of shallots, chopped
  • 1 pound cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
  • Salt to taste

Method

  1. Place the wine, vinegar, and shallots in a saucepan on medium heat. Reduce until about 1 ounce of liquid is left.
  2. Add the cubed butter to the hot liquid. Set pan over medium-high heat and whisk. When the butter is melted and begins to incorporate, remove from heat and continue to whip until the sauce becomes smooth and shiny.
  3. Adjust seasoning and add salt to taste.
  4. The sauce should be kept warm and not hot. You may need to whisk the sauce every now and then so it keeps its consistency.

Tips and Tricks

  • Make sure the butter is hard and cold. If you use soft butter, it will be more difficult to achieve an emulsion.
  • Traditional French cuisine says to strain the sauce to remove the shallots but you can leave them in.
  • If you see that the sauce is beginning to bubble or break, reduce heat or remove it altogether. The carry-over heat will still allow the butter to melt.
  • Add a small amount of cream to the sauce to help stabilize it and keep it from breaking. This will also add to the creaminess of the sauce.

Editors' Recommendations

Joe Morales
Joe Morales
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Joe Morales is a trained chef with over five years of experience working in fine dining and Michelin recommended restaurants…
It’s About Time To Learn To Make Ratatouille
ratatouille recipe

Whether you’re an avid home gardener, a farmer’s market regular, or a discerning produce-market shopper, you’re undoubtedly aware of the bountiful nature of the summer growing season. Many fruits and vegetables reach their prime durinig the warmest months of the year, including famously seasonal (and famously short-lived) items like tomatoes. It’s common for home cooks to seek out summer recipes that highlight the fresh stuff to its fullest effect, often in raw salads, cold soups, and no-cook sauces.

But, as it happens, one of the finest culinary platforms for seasonal summer produce comes in the form of a traditionally slow-cooked French dish. That’s right: We're talking about ratatouille. In terms of texture and cooking methods, this Gallic staple falls somewhere between a stew and a casserole, which is why you’ll often see it on menus in the fall and winter. But its key ingredients include tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, and fresh herbs, all of which you’ll find in abundance during the summer months. 

Read more
How to Make Raw Fermented Hot Sauce at Home
how to make raw fermented hot sauce at home pdpc peppersred

Fermentation is one of the oldest methods of food preservation, but now foodies are using this age-old method for more than increasing a food's shelf stability. In recent years, researchers have discovered that fermented foods also have several health benefits, leading young, health-focused consumers to embrace food trends such as homemade kombucha, sauerkraut, and kimchi; and contemporary chefs have realized the potential of fermented foods and their unique umami-driven flavor characteristics and acidic qualities. One of the most exciting fermented ingredients for spice lovers, though, is hot sauce.

While the standard vinegar-based hot sauce favored by the fearless foodies brings the sting, tears, and even hallucinations — if the peppers are hot enough — lacto-fermented hot sauce brings a new palette of flavors in addition to the adrenaline rush of the heat. For those who want to take things a step further, creating a raw lacto-fermented hot sauce is the most natural method, and results in a hot sauce that contains probiotics.
What is Lacto-Fermentation?
Simply put, lacto-fermentation is a type of fermentation that uses salt, an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment, and the lactic acid bacteria (LAB) formally known as lactobacillus, found on the skin of fruits and vegetables to break down the sugars in food to form lactic acid and sometimes alcohol or carbon dioxide.

Read more
How To Make Sausage Gravy
How to make sausage gravy

In times of distress, we turn to comfort food: Hearty, delicious, artery-clogging goodness that warms us up from the inside out and just makes the world a better place in general. The world is in a bad way right now, so many of us are turning to our favorite comfort food dishes to help us get through this trying time. And no region does comfort food quite like the South. Fried chicken, gooey mac and cheese, chicken-fried steak, grits ... the list goes on and on. But one of the best comfort foods to come out of the South has to be good, old-fashioned biscuits and sausage gravy. 

This quintessential Southern breakfast dish is about as American as it gets: The Farmer’s Almanac looked into the origins of this iconic meal and found that it’s been around since the Revolutionary War. Because it doesn’t require many ingredients and is incredibly filling, it was the perfect, extremely caloric breakfast to fill people up before long days of work, especially in the logging camps of Appalachia (gravy is also known by another name: sawmill gravy). And biscuits and gravy really is all about the good stuff: fresh-from-the-oven, fluffy, steaming biscuits heaped high with a rich, creamy sauce and mouthwatering sausage. Although early sawmill gravy was done with bacon drippings, the recipe has evolved to typically use pork sausage, which is cooked first and then flour, milk, and seasonings are mixed with the left-over fat to make a roux sauce that thickens to a thick, oozy consistency. The sausage is then added back in and voilà.

Read more