This Easy Peppercorn Sauce Will Transform Your Steak, Pork, or Chicken

Preparing a sauce to accompany a seared piece of meat may seem overly fussy to most home cooks, but some pan sauces are not only easy, but also able to transform a simple meal into a restaurant-worthy experience. Green peppercorn sauce is one of those sauces. It’s hard to mess up, and delivers a peppery bite, intensely meaty aroma, and perfect food-coating creaminess that will have you dipping everything in it—from your slices of steak to your fries to, eventually, your fingers—until not a drop is left. 

The beauty of a sauce like green peppercorn sauce is that it comes together in just one pan (the same one you use to cook your protein) with only a handful of ingredients, including shallots, green peppercorns, stock, brandy, and cream. The most annoying of those are the green peppercorns themselves, but they come in a can, which means you can buy a few cans at once, keep them in your pantry for months on end, and then be able to use them with very little effort or planning.

While it’s often served with steak, it’s worth knowing that green peppercorn sauce also pairs well with many other proteins, from pork to chicken and even fish. If it can be seared in a skillet, there’s a good chance green peppercorn sauce will taste great with it.

Here are the most important things to know about making this sauce successfully at home.

What Is Green Peppercorn Sauce?

Green peppercorn sauce is simply a variant of sauce au poivre, just made with green peppercorns instead of black peppercorns. Pan peppercorn sauces have been a bistro and brasserie staple since the late nineteenth century. The black peppercorn version is perhaps most famous as the sauce that accompanies steak au poivre, while green peppercorn sauce often pops up as one of several popular options for steak frites. While sauce au poivre made with black peppercorns packs a punchy kick, green peppercorn sauce has a slightly fruity, less assertive flavor due to the difference in the peppercorns themselves. 

Green and black peppercorns are the very same fruit of the Piper nigrum plant, just in different stages of ripeness and processed differently. Green peppercorns are younger than the fully mature black peppercorns, with a softer, fleshier texture and milder flavor that has notes of juniper and pine. They’re also less fiery than black peppercorns, though they do still pack some heat.

To preserve their fresh color, texture, and fruity flavor once picked, green peppercorns are preserved in a solution of water, salt, and sometimes citric acid. They’re often brined in two styles: Thai and European. Thai-style green peppercorns are packed in a lightly salted solution, while European-style green peppercorns are processed in a concentrated brine that gives them a saltier, caper-like quality. The difference in flavor between the two styles is noticeable, and you’ll want to use European-style brined green peppercorns for this recipe, as their more assertive flavor pairs well with the heavy cream.

Building a Great Green Peppercorn Sauce

Building this assertive, rich pan sauce is not hard, but there are a few key steps to ensure you end up with a balanced and creamy sauce every time you make it. It’s worth noting that when made in a restaurant, green peppercorn sauce will typically not be cooked like a pan sauce, but will instead be prepared in larger batches built on a well-made stock (usually beef). At home, though, it makes more sense to prepare it as a pan sauce, which produces the perfect amount for a single meal and takes advantage of a key byproduct of pan-roasted meats: the flavorful fond sticking to the bottom of the pan after searing.

The first step, then, isn’t really part of this sauce recipe, since the specifics will vary with the protein, but the sauce requires it: searing your meat. I have written the searing into the first step of the recipe below in vague terms, just to make clear that it is a required precursor to making the sauce, but you’ll need to figure out the timing and doneness depending on what you’re cooking and your personal preferences (or, you know, consult the many recipes and guides we have to searing meat here on Serious Eats).

1. Build a Good Fond: As mentioned above, green peppercorn sauce doesn’t start with the sauce, but with the fond in the pan—those tasty browned bits left behind after searing meat. The key here, then, is developing a good fond in your pan so that it can enhance the roasty, meaty flavor in the sauce.

The single most important thing to guarantee a good fond? Choosing the right pan. Cast iron, carbon steel (my favorite pan in my kitchen), and stainless-steel skillets are all ideal for searing. What you absolutely don’t want here is a nonstick skillet, because fond is created through a desirable amount of sticking, which nonstick pans are designed to not do.

It’s also important to crank your heat up to high when searing for maximum browning. Turn on your fans and filters, open the windows, or do whatever else is necessary to manage the inevitable smoke.

After the meat has cooked, set it aside to rest. Now you can direct your attention to the sauce. If there is any excess fat (more than 1 tablespoon), pour it off. But do not wipe the skillet out; you just worked really hard to create that flavorful layer of fond, and you’re gonna need it.

2. Layer the Flavor: Once your pan is filled with a glossy mahogany fond, it’s time to build even more flavor. I start by gently sweating the green peppercorns with minced shallots until softened and the shallots are translucent, but not browned. Shallots have a subtle, concentrated flavor that complements other ingredients without overpowering them, which is exactly what we want in this sauce—assertive, but balanced flavors. Plus when minced, the shallot’s texture enhances the sauce rather than getting in the way. 

Along with the shallots, I also throw a sprig of fresh thyme into the sauce. To me, thyme evokes French flavor more than other woodsy herbs, adding a deep herbal earthiness that pairs well with meat while still being delicate enough to not overpower other flavors.

After the aromatics, I deglaze with brandy, adding that wood-aged complexity of the alcohol, and follow it with stock. This is a good time to pull out your freezer stash of homemade beef or chicken stock. The foundation to any great French sauce is a well-made stock, and it plays true here, adding meaty depth and viscosity via its natural gelatin content that most store-bought broth lacks. If homemade isn’t an option, the next best option is a quality stock from a local butcher or gourmet food shop, or store-bought low-sodium chicken broth. Do not—I repeat do not—use mass-market beef stock or broth. In my experience, they don’t taste beefy at all, just salty, and will taste even worse when reduced down in a sauce.

3. Concentrate the Flavor: At this stage, be patient and let the stock reduce by about half. You can confirm this by pouring it into a measuring cup, or if you’re confident in your ability to estimate volumes, just tilt the skillet to eyeball how much is there. Proper reduction concentrates the sauce’s flavor and enhances its body (assuming you started with a good quality stock with some natural gelatin in it).

4. Emulsify With Cream: Just as important as building the sauce’s flavor is the need to create a velvety emulsion. A properly emulsified sauce will look creamy, thick, and opaque. As Kenji points out in his chicken with white wine pan sauce, a pan sauce is essentially a fat and water emulsion. This sauce, and many like it, is a failure if broken—the texture suffers, the flavors suffer. While forming a butterfat-in-water emulsion is not as easy as just melting butter and water together, it’s also not that challenging to achieve, and the emulsion in this sauce is harder to break than most, another reason any one with any skill level can make it. 

The strength of this sauce’s emulsion can be attributed to two factors. First, a small amount of all-purpose flour is whisked in with the sautéed shallots right before the liquids are added. The added starch thickens the sauce and, on a microscopic level, physically impedes fat molecules from coalescing, giving the sauce longer-lasting stability.

The second, and primary, way that this sauce is thickened and emulsified is with heavy cream, and it’s one of the reasons cream sauces are so easy even for novice cooks. The cream not only supplies fat, richness, and flavor, but it’s also an emulsion in itself—a homogenous mixture of proteins, fats, and water. Building a sauce with an ingredient that’s already in an emulsified state can help with your own sauce emulsion. 

Cream is a relatively stable emulsion, meaning it can withstand a fair amount of heat and agitation without breaking (just think of how much you have to churn cream before butter forms), but cream can still break if pushed to its limits, so just take care not to let it boil down to the point of breaking, and you should be fine. Occasionally swirling the skillet as it simmers not only makes you feel like a saucier in a fancy French restaurant, but it also agitates the mixture, ensuring the fat is evenly dispersed throughout.

If you find the sauce does start to look greasy, that means it’s broken, likely by having reduced too much. First, congratulations, because wow that must have taken a lot of effort (read: neglect), but you can likely still bring it back together. Gently swirling a few tablespoons of water back into the sauce will usually bring it back together.

The emulsified, finished sauce is now ready to be spooned over your seared meat. I recommend doing this tableside to impress your family or friends—they don’t need to know how easy it really was to perfect this restaurant staple.