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Sauces · Recipe No. 319

Peppercorn Sauce

The steakhouse classic made the modern way, as a pan sauce: shallot softened in the steak pan, coarsely crushed black peppercorns, a splash of brandy to lift the browned bits, beef stock boiled down and double cream to finish. Ready in the ten minutes the steaks rest, with a version for when there is no steak pan.

  • Serves 4
  • Enough for 4 steaks
  • 10 minutes, while the steaks rest
  • Black, green or both
  • No steak pan? See the notes
  • French / British

Method

  1. Cook your steaks (see the Minute Steak garni or any steak recipe), lift them on to a warm plate to rest and keep the pan. Pour off all but about a tablespoon of the fat, but leave every browned scrap on the bottom: that is the flavour.

  2. Put the pan over a medium heat and add the butter. When it foams, add the shallots and cook for 2–3 minutes, stirring and scraping, until soft and translucent but not brown.

  3. Stir in the crushed black peppercorns and cook for 30 seconds or so, until you can smell them.

  4. Take the pan off the heat and pour in the brandy. Return it to the heat and either let it bubble away until almost gone, scraping up the browned bits, or flame it: tilt the pan away from you, or light it with a long match, and stand back until the flames die down. Never pour brandy straight from the bottle into a hot pan, and turn off the cooker hood fan first.

  5. Pour in the stock and boil hard for 4–5 minutes, until reduced by about half and slightly syrupy.

  6. Stir in the cream, and the green peppercorns and mustard if using. Simmer for 2–3 minutes, until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

  7. Tip in any juices that have run from the resting steaks, taste and add salt (you will rarely need more pepper). Serve straight away, poured over or beside the steaks.

Tip: tap a step to tick it off as you cook.

See also

Chef’s notes

  • Made without a steak pan: melt 25 g butter in a small saucepan, soften the shallots and toast the pepper as above, then add the brandy and boil it off. Use 350 ml stock and reduce it by two-thirds to make up for the missing pan juices; a few drops of Worcestershire sauce or a teaspoon of demi-glace adds the meaty depth. Finish with the cream as above. This is the way to make it ahead, for chops, burgers or a nut roast; it reheats gently, loosened with a splash of water.
  • Crushing the pepper: use a pestle and mortar, or put the peppercorns in a bag and press down hard with the base of a heavy pan. You want coarse, crunchy pieces, not powder. For a milder sauce, shake the crushed pepper in a sieve to get rid of the fine dust, which carries most of the heat.
  • Green peppercorns are the same berries picked unripe and kept in brine; they are softer, fresher and milder. Use them on their own (2 tbsp) for a gentler green peppercorn sauce, or with the black for both heat and juiciness.
  • For classic steak au poivre, press the crushed pepper firmly on to both sides of the steaks before cooking instead of adding it to the sauce, and make the sauce in the same pan with the brandy, stock and cream.
  • Without alcohol, deglaze with the stock alone and add a squeeze of lemon juice or a few drops of red wine vinegar at the end to lift it.

From au poivre to the steakhouse

Steak au poivre, steak crusted with crushed pepper and served with a pan sauce, is a French bistro classic. Several Paris restaurants have claimed to have invented it in the early twentieth century, but none of the claims is proven. The cream and brandy sauce became a fixture of British pub and steakhouse menus, where it is now simply called peppercorn sauce.

This page replaces Cookeryonline’s original recipe card No. 319, Pepper Sauce, which sweated 50 g of onion with soaked, crushed black and green peppercorns, deglazed with white wine, reduced 200 ml of beef stock or demi-glace to a glaze and finished it with 100 ml of cream, with brandy optional. We have kept its mix of black and green pepper, the stock or demi-glace and the option of white wine, and made it in the steak pan the way most cooks do now.

How this recipe was developed

We compared peppercorn sauces from Gordon Ramsay, Fallow (Jack Croft and Will Murray), Christopher Kimball’s America’s Test Kitchen and the best-rated version on BBC Good Food, and kept the black-and-green pepper and stock reduction of our own original card No. 319.

  • A pan sauce. Gordon Ramsay and BBC Good Food both make it in the pan the steaks were cooked in, so the browned juices go into the sauce. We do the same.
  • Brandy to lift the pan. Ramsay and Fallow use brandy or cognac, flamed or boiled off, to dissolve the browned bits. Our original card used white wine; we give both.
  • Toast the pepper. Fallow toasts cracked black and green peppercorns before the shallot goes in; we give them 30 seconds in the butter for the same fragrance.
  • Reduce the stock first. America’s Test Kitchen boils the broth down before it meets the cream, for body without flour. We reduce the stock hard by half before adding the cream.
  • No steak pan. America’s Test Kitchen reduces its broth in a separate pan while the steaks cook. Our make-ahead variation builds on that, with extra stock to make up for the missing pan juices.
  • Finish with the resting juices. Ramsay and America’s Test Kitchen stir the steak juices back in at the end; Ramsay and Fallow sharpen it with mustard or lemon. We make the Dijon optional.

Sources we compared (ratings as shown on each site on 31 October 2026):

This is an original Cookeryonline recipe written in our own words. Ingredient choices and techniques are credited above; no source text has been copied.

Shopping list for 4 portions

Fruit & veg

Dairy & eggs

Tins, jars & stock

Oils, vinegars & sauces

Wine & drinks

Store cupboard (check you have)

Rewritten as a modern Cookeryonline recipe in October 2026. The previous version came from the Cookeryonline Excel workbook “SR319”.