Julia Child's Butter Tip For Great, Hassle-Free Steak Sauce

Once you learn how to properly sear a steak, there's perhaps no other dish more satisfying to make, not to mention satisfying to eat. A perfectly done steak can unquestionably stand on its own, but it's elevated even more by the various accouterments that you can add to it. There are a bunch of simple add-ons that you can have in addition to your steak that take it to another level, and a good steak sauce is certainly one of them. A fine steak sauce is the proverbial cherry on top of your dish. And what's better: You can make a super simple steak sauce with practically no extra effort, all while using the same pan you seared your steak in.

Julia Child demonstrated back in the 1960s how to make an incredibly easy steak sauce using the juices from your pan after the steak is finished cooking. On an episode of "The French Chef", Child states, "After [the sauce] is boiled down and thickened, you want to put just a little bit of butter in; and this is sort of the final unctuousness of the sauce that also helps thicken the sauce a little bit. And you want to swish it around, and you never put it over heat after you've put your butter in" (via YouTube). In this way, you can avoid a sauce that's too runny while also enriching the sauce's flavor even more. It's a real win-win, and a wonderful tip from the legend herself.

Adding butter to your steak sauce is all fine and dandy, but surely there's more besides butter and leftover steak juices, right? Of course — here's where you have a little more say in how you make your sauce. Most of the time, just as Julia Child mentions, the ingredients in your steak sauce are simply the things that you already had in the pan while cooking your steak. Ingredients such as garlic, rosemary, thyme, and salt and pepper are often in the mix when cooking a steak, and these ingredients work perfectly well for a beautifully savory sauce. You can also add a little beef stock or red wine to your sauce for even more flavor.

It should be noted that this isn't the only way to make a steak sauce. You can make a wonderful four-ingredient steak sauce without resorting solely to the ingredients already in your pan. As well, you can really let your imagination flow and combine different ingredients for your sauce. But, no matter which route you go down, this tip of using butter as a rich thickening agent is definitely one that you can keep in your back pocket as you sear up your next steak.