Love Your Ugly Fond!

Fond (pronounced fahn), the French culinary term for "base" or "foundation", refers to the remaining residue or brown bits that sticks to the pan after browning meat or vegetables, either on the stove top or at the bottom of a roasting pan in the oven. 

These brown bits contains hundreds and thousands of complex and irresistible

flavor compounds unlocked by Maillard Reactions and Caramelization when proteins and sugar are present in cooking.

Fond is used by professional cooks to form the base of many flavorful sauces, while it is mistakened by many home cooks as dirty, nasty burnt bits and simply discard down the drain.

The tasty bits stuck to the pan are largely water soluble - so water, wine, stock, etc., is used to "dissolve" them and this is a technique known as degla

zing.

A fond, which means the same as a base stock, is categorized into 3 main categories: white, brown or vegetable stocks (in French referred to as fond blanc, fond brun and fond de vegetal).  They are at the core of classical cooking and of the five mother sauces, at least three are based on fond by deglazing.

Deglazing is a cooking technique for removing and dissolving browned food residue from a pan to flavor sauces, soups, and gravies by introducing liquid to the pan to loosen and disperse all of those concentrated flavors, aka fond, back into your dish. Flavor the fond with the addition of an aromatic or two -- such as shallots or garlic -- thicken it with flour, tomato, or vegetables, and you have the blueprint for hundreds of sauces and gravies.

To deglaze...

Notes:

Fond is literally translated to mean "the bottom" or "base."

In classical French cooking, the word is also used to mean "stock," another common base for various recipes.