Stock & Fond Atlas · Sauce
Fond de Légumes
- Easy
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, a warm current of chile, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 50 g butter
- 300 g onion, sliced thin
- 150 g leek, white and pale green
- 120 g fennel
- 100 g celery
- 120 g carrot
- 200 g button mushrooms, sliced
- 200 g ripe tomato, chopped
- 8 g salt
- 1.5 litres cold water
- 4 parsley stalks
- 1 bay leaf
- 6 white peppercorns
Equipment
Fine sieve
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedStraining & passing through a sieveKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · celery
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cut every vegetable to 5 mm dice or thin slices. Small pieces give up their flavour inside the short window this stock allows.
- Melt the butter in a wide pan, add the vegetables and the salt, set the lid ajar and sweat over medium-low heat for 18 minutes, until the onion is glassy and the pan smells sweet, with no browning at all. 18 min
- Add the tomato and the cold water, bring to 85C (185F), and hold 30 minutes without ever letting it boil. 30 min
- Pull the pot off the heat, drop in the parsley, bay and peppercorns and steep covered for 15 minutes, as you would tea. 15 min
- Strain through a fine sieve without pressing, and cool fast. Season it only when you know what it is for.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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