Poultry Trimmings

When preparing a bird for roasting, the wings, backbone and any other trimmed bones should never be discarded - they are essential to the accompanying sauce. Roasting these trimmings in a hot pan until deeply browned produces the Maillard reaction compounds that give a pan sauce its richness, colour and depth. Without them, a sauce made only from shallots and liquid will taste thin and one-dimensional. Matthew Ryle roasted the poussin trimmings as his very first action, allowing them to caramelise while everything else progressed. This is a fundamental principle of classical French sauce cookery that was noticeably absent from both contestants' efforts.