The bouquet garni (French for "garnished bouquet") is a bundle of herbs usually tied together with string and mainly used to prepare soup, stock, and various stews. The bouquet is cooked with the other ingredients, but is removed prior to consumption.
There is no generic recipe for bouquet garni, but most recipes include parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Depending on the recipe, the bouquet garni may also include basil, burnet, chervil, rosemary, peppercorns, savory and tarragon. Vegetables such as carrot, celery (leaves or stem), celeriac, leek, onion and parsley root are sometimes included in the bouquet.
Sometimes, the bouquet is not bound with string, and its ingredients are filled into a small sachet, a net, or even a tea strainer, instead. Traditionally, the aromatics are bound within leek leaves, though a coffee filter (or cheesecloth) and butcher twine can be used, instead.
In Devon, thyme is rarely used in the recipe.
Dishes made with a bouquet garni include:
- Boeuf bourguignon
- Pot au feu
- Brown Windsor soup
- Poule au pot
- Carbonnade flamande
- Lapin chasseur
- Blanquette de veau
- Ossobuco
- Bouillabaisse
- Court-bouillon
- French onion soup
- Cassoulet
Famous quotes containing the word bouquet:
“That nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness and attentiveness which, in every refined and honorable attachment, is contemporary with the courtship, and precedes the final banns and the rite; but which, like the bouquet of the costliest German wines, too often evaporates upon pouring love out to drink, in the disenchanting glasses of the matrimonial days and nights.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)