I love slow cooker pot roast — tender slices of chuck roast, meltingly soft carrots, little golden potatoes that burst from their peels when you bite into them, and the gravy. Oh, the gravy! Few things are more satisfying than the beefy sauce that’s slowly been mingling with those ingredients all day. It’s the best part of fall, and I make my mom’s old recipe the moment the first crimson leaf drops — except I give it a major glow-up.  

My mom, like most home cooks from the 1980s, relied on a packet of French onion soup mix to make slow cooker pot roast. While I still remember it fondly, it’s far too salty and artificial-tasting to my palate these days. That’s why I switched to using Savory Choice demi glace instead. 

Demi glace is a rich, brown French sauce that’s made by combining espagnole sauce (a tomato-beef sauce) with beef stock and wine. The mixture is then simmered and reduced until it’s a thick glaze. It’s traditionally used as a finishing sauce for meat dishes like steak with mushroom sauce or impossibly tender chateaubriand — the strong beefy flavor and lip-smacking texture makes everything taste richer and meatier. 

It takes a long time and a lot of skill to make homemade demi glace. I made it once in culinary school and, while it was delicious, it was tedious. I vowed that life was too short to ever fuss with it again. Fortunately, Savory Choice makes shelf-stable packets of demi glace concentrate for those of us with busy lives. 

It’s made from wine, vegetables, beef stock, maltodextrin (a sweetener), butter, and beef fat. When mixed with a few tablespoons of water, it makes a rich, velvety pan sauce, but that’s not all it can do.

I season a three-pound tied chuck roast, plunk it in my slow cooker, mix one 1.33-ounce packet of the demi glace concentrate with 3/4 cup of water, and pour it over the meat. Then I add large peeled carrots and a handful of small unpeeled yellow potatoes, turn it on low, and let the magic happen. The demi glace mingles with the beef juices, and in 8 to 9 hours I’ve got a delicious gravy that tastes like a French chef had something to do with it. 

Because chuck roast is a fairly fatty cut, I degrease the cooking liquid in a gravy separator and whisk the defatted juices into a simple roux to make a luxuriously thick gravy in seconds. I pour the gravy over the sliced roast and veggies and voilà! My favorite slow cooker meal, Frenchified! 

It’s hard to imagine these little packets hanging around in the pantry for more than a few weeks. If somehow they do, Savory Choice recommends using them within two years from their manufacture date. 

But when stored properly — in an airtight container, kept in a cool, dry place — they are usually still safe to eat past the suggested date. Before you toss them (or any pantry staple) use your senses of smell and taste. You may end up saving hundreds of dollars a year.