How to Make a Bouquet Garni

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:04


CURTIS STONE: Hello. I’m Curtis Stone. And this GMC Trade Secret is about giving your dishes extra flavor. We can all do with that, right?

Now, what I’m going to show you how to do is make a bouquet garni. What I’m going to do is take a leek and just literally peel off a leaf. Now, what you do with these greens of the leeks is usually throw them in the rubbish, because you don’t use them. But I’m going to show you a purpose for them. I’m going to take a bay leaf, some thyme and a few of these parsley stalks. Now, you can use the leaves, but I prefer the stalks, because you get all of the flavor without all of the chlorophyll. And it’s also utilizing something that you wouldn’t use in the kitchen.

So once you have all your herbs inside your leek, you just fold it over like that. This is called a bouquet garni, all right. Now, it’s a fancy name for a very simple job. Make sure it’s tied nice and tight, and then you can literally drop this into your stock or your broth or whatever it is that you’re making.

Now, this is a bit of an old-fashioned traditional way of adding flavor to a stock, bouquet garni. There’s something else I want you to know about. It’s called a sachet d’epices. What you do is you get a piece of cheese cloth like this and you can put whatever flavors you want. So this time we could put some peppercorns. We could put some garlic, a bay leaf, some thyme, some other herbs, any of these spices that you wanted to; and the same kind of deal. You just tie it up like that, put that into a little pouch, get a piece of string, and I’m just going to wrap that around.

I like to call it the chef’s tea bag, because it is kind of like a tea bag. You go over to whatever it is that you’re cooking – like I said, soups, stocks, potatoes; you know, it doesn’t matter what you’re cooking. If you want to add a bit of extra flavor, you just drop that in for the last half an hour of cooking, and then you pull it out just before it’s ready and you’re good to go.

That’s it. I’m Curtis Stone, and that’s your GMC Trade Secret. Go on. Get cooking.