How To Make A Bouquet Garni
or Sachet
or Sachet
A bouquet garni is a bundle of herbs and aromatics used to add flavor and aroma to a dish. Because it is removed once all the flavor has been extracted, tying it into a bundle makes that easier. No one wants to fish whole peppercorns out of a boiling pot!
A classic bouquet garni consists of a bay leaf, some fresh thyme, a few parsley sprigs (stems only, as the leaves leech color) and a few peppercorns tied up in a leek leaf. You can also use cheesecloth to wrap things up, in which case it would be called a sachet. What goes into a bouquet garni doesn’t really matter. It’s just a practical method for delivering flavor, so feel free to include whatever spices and herbs that you wish.
Here’s the basic method:
Combine 2 teaspoons black peppercorns, 1 bay leaf, ½ stalk celery, several sprigs of fresh thyme, a handful of parsley stems and 3 cloves.
In this case, we are wrapping our ingredients in cheesecloth to make a sachet.
Tie off with butcher’s twine…or, if you don’t have butcher’s twine (like us in this photo), tie the ends of the cheesecloth to make a little satchel.
Comments 6
I would love to try ravolini
What a nice idea!
I’ve been looking at the site this morning and see that there is a little something for everyone from gamers to not so professional cooks such as myself, and then for the artistic minded.
So glad to have found your website.
Lynn
I made a sachet based on your instructions above. I say sachet because I used cheesecloth and wrapped it with thin twine. It worked very well and stayed put together. It did puff out and that was a shock, but the sachet served its purpose well, and kept all of the spices inside the cheesecloth and out of the pot. I used it for the corned beef brisket, remembering how unpleasing the hard spices were stuck to the meat when I cooked this before. It did not reduce the flavor of the spice packet one bit. This is an excellent way to get the spices in a dish without having to try to scrape them out or off later.
And, for those people you really like to come up with a special little gift for, I think this is excellent.
Lynn A.
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I use those fillable tea filters. They are available in most dollar stores and grocery stores for a dollar. They come with drawstrings.
Great idea Margaret!
I use those too sometimes.
Matthew
Marx Foods