I think peppercorn sauce is an absolute classic  sauce, not much beats it really. Hi I'm Becca one of the chef tutors here at the Waitrose cookery  school. Today I'm going to be taking you through exactly how to make the perfect peppercorn sauce.  Peppercorn sauce is my number one choice of sauce to have with steak and chips - it's really  creamy and it's got those lovely peppercorns in there giving it absolutely heaps of flavour.  So I've got my pan on a medium heat and I'm going to add in my shallots and also a little splash of  sunflower oil. Along with my shallots in the pan, I'm going to add a pinch of salt, they give  off a really nice sweet flavor into the base of the sauce so it is a really important  step. Just cook them for five minutes.

I'm going to use my microplane to grate the  garlic straight into the pan with the shallots.

So you don't want to add your garlic in too early  because it burns really, really easily. If you're making a sauce where you're reducing part of  it down you really want to be careful with your garlic and your shallots because basically you're  just going to be intensifying those flavors as you reduce the sauce down. So try to add your garlic  in near the end and then when you add the other ingredients that will help to stop the garlic  cooking any further. So we've got a tablespoon of black peppercorns going straight into the pan, you  could use green peppercorns here as well that's absolutely fine and then once you've added your  peppercorns in, we're going to add in our brandy.

So we're going to be using two tablespoons. So  we're cooking the brandy off for a moment or two, we want to keep all of that flavor in there  but we're just taking off some of the water.

If you don't want to put any alcohol in  your peppercorn sauce, it's absolutely fine just leave that out. As soon as it's looking  a little bit thicker in the bottom of the pan then we're ready to go in with our stock so I've  got 500ml of fresh beef stock. If you use a stock cube it's got quite a lot of salt in it already  and then as you reduce your sauce down you'll find they'll end up really, really salty. It's always  best to use a homemade or a fresh stock. If you are going to use veg stock that's absolutely fine,  it's not the traditional way to make this sauce.

The link to the full recipe is in the description.  You've added quite a lot of cold ingredients into the pan; 500ml of stock, so you might need to  just turn your pan up in order to get this boiling and reduce it down and you want it to go sort of  much thicker consistency. Once you've made your sauce, you can pop it in a plastic container  and get it into the fridge and keep it there for about three days. We've got 100ml of  whipping cream going straight into the pan, I'm also going to add in two teaspoons of dijon  mustard, this is going to add loads of flavor into our sauce and then mix those ingredients all  together. You can see straight away that it's that classic color of peppercorn sauce, it's looking  good and it's starting to smell really good too.

You're going to want to leave this to reduce for  about 20 minutes but you want to do this just at a simmer, not at a boil. The sauce is thickened  up now, as I'm running my spatula through the base of the pan the sauce is splitting and then  coming back together quite slowly and I can see the base of the pan as I do that and that's how  you sort of tell this at the right thickness.

So because we've reduced the sauce down so  much it's really intensified the flavors there so I don't think it needs any more salt for  me but always worth checking and adding any more if you want to. So I've got my steak and  chips here, we've also got some videos on how to make the perfect steak and triple cooked chips  - those videos are in the top right hand corner and are in the description below. So there it  is, peppercorn sauce. Absolutely perfect sauce, I think it's a real classic and definitely  give it a go it's pretty easy make it in advance and then you can reheat it when you're  ready to eat your steak and chips and enjoy!