Sauces for Grilled Meats

The juices from grilled meats drip down into the grill, so you can’t make a sauce by deglazing as you would for sautéed meats. The French deal with this problem by serving a sauce that isn’t based on the juices released by the meat. In inexpensive restaurants, the only sauce will probably be a dollop of beurre maître d’hôtel, which is made by working or whipping butter with chopped parsley and lemon juice. The combination is surprisingly good. In more expensive (or experimental) restaurants, the same steak might be served with some other compound butter. Compound butters are simple mixtures of cold butter and flavorful ingredients. Escoffier lists almost 35 combinations (a few are described below), but you can easily make up your own using non-French ingredients (tomatillos, reconstituted dried chiles, curry mixtures) or ingredients that weren’t around in Escoffier’s era (pink or green peppercorns). The other classic accompaniment to grilled steaks is béarnaise sauce and occasionally its cousin, Choron, which is a béarnaise with a little tomato purée in it. Either of these sauces is traditionally served in a sauceboat for guests to help themselves, never already on the steak.