Making a wine sauce reduction for your barbecue—are you nuts?!? As much as I like good food, this is something I never would have considered in the past. But now, when everything is already cooked sous vide and all I need to do is simply throw it on the grill for a couple of minutes—I’m not busy with checking for doneness or worrying about over/under cooking—I find myself filling my extra time by making sauces on the day of the barbecue. It’s those “finishing touch” items that transform your weekend barbecue into restaurant-level cuisine.

Another interesting discovery I made is that the juice in the bag that you sous-vided the meat in is an amazing base toward building any sauce. It is already halfway toward being a great demi-glace (super-concentrated beef stock), which traditionally takes hours and hours to prepare. Demi-glace is always going to deliver an amazing sauce no matter what you add to the pan, so here is an easy base recipe; riff and freestyle away :).