I like my bacon sandwich with brown sauce, but that means keeping a bottle for a long time. What else can I do with it?
Will, via email
In the early 1980s, Tom Harris, co-owner and chef at the Marksman in east London, made a beer mat from penny coins for his dad (and in the quest to secure a Blue Peter badge): “The instructions said to put the dirty coins in brown sauce overnight,” he recalls. “The next morning, they were all shiny and looked brand new, so there’s another use for it right there!”
Brown sauce is “an absolute marvel”, agrees Sabrina Ghayour, author of the recently published Persiana Easy, and not just for its cleaning prowess: “If you break it down, the sauce is packed with some pretty interesting ingredients, including my beloved tamarind.” It’s worth exploring your bottle options beyond HP, too, not least because there was much controversy back in 2011 when the brand gave its recipe, which had remained unchanged for more than a century, a tweak. “They reduced the salt [from 2.1g per 100g to 1.3g] and it completely upset the balance,” Harris says, “and that’s a great sadness.” That’s why Ghayour’s go-to these days is Tiptree: “It has a slightly less vinegary punch and a more rounded sweetness,” which comes with the added bonus of making it “even more versatile”.
If you were to ask Harris’ dad, one such use would be a piece of fried fish in a buttered roll with lots of brown sauce: “That’s a lovely, lovely thing.” Otherwise, use it in place of tonkatsu sauce “with anything crumbed or fried, such as a pork chop”, he adds.
The “tangy, savoury nature” of the stuff also works a dream with a hash, says Anna Tobias, chef-owner of Cafe Deco in London, which bottles its own brown sauce. “I often do a hash after a Sunday roast, when you have a bit of leftover meat, cabbage and potatoes,” she says. “Fry them up, top with a fried egg, put some brown sauce on the side and that’s delicious.” Or pair it with roast pork: “Instead of apple sauce, why not try brown?” Tobias says. “It has the same sweet-sour tang and will cut through.”
Brown sauce is, after all, a porky condiment, although it was traditionally partnered with sausages rather than bacon. “When I was the tea boy at Dad’s warehouse, I’d do the 11am sandwich run and it was always sausages with brown sauce and bacon with red,” Harris says. “That was the dividing line.”
Ghayour says our reader Will, however, could also harness the acidity in his excess sauce to “give wonderful life to soups, stews, sauces, gravies, marinades [think sticky barbecue-style] and beyond”. Meanwhile, as the weather cools, Tobias would be tempted to segue to homemade baked beans: “I know not many people bother making their own beans, but adding a bit of brown sauce to the tomatoes and cooking that with the beans would be very good.”
That all said, sometimes you don’t need to look beyond the obvious: “Brown sauce is really good for breakfast, and maybe that’s its purpose in life,” Tobias says very sensibly. A good dollop on the side of a full English, or on a bacon sandwich, is always going to be more than OK.
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