The Absolute Best Sauce Pairings For Bistro Steak

While bistro steak might sound like a steak dinner you order at a fine dining restaurant, it's actually an affordable cut of steak you can get at the butcher. A cut from the tender shoulder, bistro steak encompasses the hanger, skirt, and flap steaks. While it's a smaller and less common cut on steakhouse menus, bistro steak is delicious, economical, and easy to upgrade with a finishing sauce. We consulted an expert for the absolute best sauce pairings for bistro steak.

K.C. Gulbro, owner of both FoxFire and Copper Fox restaurants in Geneva, Illinois, and chef ambassador for Certified Angus Beef, sees no need to think outside of the box for a meal as iconic and historic as a steak dinner. He says, "I love the classics! Hollandaise, Béarnaise, and demi-glace." Bistro steaks have a fat content and tenderness similar to filet mignon. Their high fat content packs a lot of rich, delicious flavor worthy of an equally decadent sauce like the classics chef Gulbro recommends.

Hollandaise is perhaps the simplest sauce of the three — and one that you may know best from its partnership with eggs benedict. It consists of egg yolks, lemon juice, and butter whisked into the ultimate creamy and bright emulsion. Béarnaise sauce is a riff on hollandaise sauce that supplements lemon juice with white wine vinegar and adds tarragon, shallots, and black pepper. A demi glace has the most complex flavor profile, derived from espagnole sauce as its base, which is one of the 5 French mother sauces that also includes hollandaise.

We have recipes for each of these three classic steak sauces and tips on achieving the best results. This béarnaise sauce recipe, for example, incorporates the shallots by first macerating them with vinegar and lemon juice to soften and sweeten them simultaneously. Like this lemony hollandaise sauce, béarnaise sauce requires some elbow grease to emulsify the acidic ingredients with the butter and egg yolks in a double boiler. Constant whisking and gentle heat is the key to both sauces, but you can trade in a whisk for a blender. We show you how to make an easy hollandaise sauce with the press of a button. Using something like this Black and Decker blender you can easily emulsify the lemon juice and egg yolks while you slowly add a stream of melted butter. You could also apply this hack to béarnaise sauce after letting the shallots macerate in the blender carafe.

Demi glace isn't as finicky as the egg yolk emulsion that lies at the foundation of the other two sauces, but this concentrated dark sauce does require more ingredients and time. The traditional method is to start with espagnole sauce, which is a roux-based sauce with stock and a mirepoix. Then, you can add beef stock, wine and herbs, and reduce it down. Another method for making demi glace is to skip the roux and reduce a doctored store-bought stock like Minor's beef stock with tomato paste, herbs and veggies, followed by a long five-hour simmer with wine.