This Foodie Friday I want to talk about deglazing. It’s a very basic technique for sauce-making but it’s also a word that scares a lot of people when they see it in a recipe. As it turns out, it also has something to do with business.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, deglazing is nothing more than using some sort of liquid to loosen the bits leftover in a pan (called fond) after you’ve cooked something in that pan. Say, for example, you’ve made a roast and after you pour out the accumulated fat and juices, you see a lot of crispy bits clinging to the pan. You would deglaze the pan by heating it and pouring in a liquid. It can be as basic as water but wine or stock is preferable because you’re going to use the resulting liquid as the foundation for a sauce or gravy. You’re doing yourself a great disservice if you don’t deglaze your pans!
I suspect some of you out there just toss the fond – you scrape the remnants into the trash. Well, as the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and that’s where the business thought comes in. How many businesses have been built around taking what someone has discarded and finding a new or better use for it? The entire recycling industry is built around that notion. While we’ve been recycling things for centuries, especially during shortages of raw materials created by war, the modern industry is just about 50 years old and is a $500 billion enterprise.
The point today is to get you to ask yourself what might be incredibly useful and productive in your business that you might be discarding. It could be a person, it could be a product that’s underperforming because it’s not sexy and no one wants to work on it, or it could be an unexplored portion of the data you gather. These things might just be fond, and with a little deglazing they can be transformed. What do you think?
Consult Keith 