Beyond the bacon sandwich: the many uses of brown sauce | Sauces and gravies

I like my bacon sandwich with brown sauce, however which means conserving a bottle for a very long time. What else can I do with it? Will, by way of emailIn the early Nineteen Eighties, Tom Harris, co-owner and chef on the Marksman in east London, made a beer mat from penny cash for his dad (and within the quest to safe a Blue Peter badge): “The directions stated to place the soiled cash in brown sauce in a single day,” he remembers. “The following morning, they have been all shiny and appeared model new, so there’s one other use for it proper there!”Brown sauce is “an absolute marvel”, agrees Sabrina Ghayour, writer of the lately revealed Persiana Straightforward, and never only for its cleansing prowess: “In case you break it down, the sauce is filled with some fairly fascinating components, together with my beloved tamarind.” It’s price exploring your bottle choices past HP, too, not least as a result of there was a lot controversy again in 2011 when the model gave its recipe, which had remained unchanged for greater than a century, a tweak. “They decreased the salt [from 2.1g per 100g to 1.3g] and it utterly upset the steadiness,” Harris says, “and that’s an important disappointment.” That’s why Ghayour’s go-to lately is Tiptree: “It has a barely much less vinegary punch and a extra rounded sweetness,” which comes with the added bonus of constructing it “much more versatile”.In case you have been to ask Harris’ dad, one such use could be a chunk of fried fish in a buttered roll with plenty of brown sauce: “That’s a beautiful, pretty factor.” In any other case, use it instead of tonkatsu sauce “with something crumbed or fried, corresponding to a pork chop”, he provides.The “tangy, savoury nature” of the stuff additionally works a dream with a hash, says Anna Tobias, chef-owner of Cafe Deco in London, which bottles its personal brown sauce. “I typically do a hash after a Sunday roast, when you’ve got a little bit of leftover meat, cabbage and potatoes,” she says. “Fry them up, high with a fried egg, put some brown sauce on the facet and that’s scrumptious.” Or pair it with roast pork: “As a substitute of apple sauce, why not strive brown?” Tobias says. “It has the identical sweet-sour tang and can minimize by.”Brown sauce is, in any case, a porky condiment, though it was historically partnered with sausages relatively than bacon. “After I was the tea boy at Dad’s warehouse, I’d do the 11am sandwich run and it was all the time sausages with brown sauce and bacon with pink,” Harris says. “That was the dividing line.”Ghayour says our reader Will, nevertheless, may additionally harness the acidity in his extra sauce to “give fantastic life to soups, stews, sauces, gravies, marinades [think sticky barbecue-style] and past”. In the meantime, because the climate cools, Tobias could be tempted to segue to do-it-yourself baked beans: “I do know not many individuals hassle making their very own beans, however including a little bit of brown sauce to the tomatoes and cooking that with the beans could be excellent.”That each one stated, typically you don’t must look past the apparent: “Brown sauce is admittedly good for breakfast, and perhaps that’s its function in life,” Tobias says very sensibly. A very good dollop on the facet of a full English, or on a bacon sandwich, is all the time going to be greater than OK.