The Importance of Sauces

THE IMPORTANCE OF SAUCES.
Sauces are an essential part of a recipe or complement to a main course, dessert and so on, knowing when to use them is an important part of cookery. This is an essay on sauces by Celeste Stewart, a food writer in the US, in 2017.

What exactly is a sauce?
Before you can fully appreciate the mother sauces, you should know what a sauce is. Sauces are thickened liquids used to add richness, flavour, and moisture to a dish. Drier foods ­–such as grilled meats, roasts, or meatloaf – are enhanced with sauces and gravies. Sauces typically contain a liquid, thickener and various flavourings and seasonings. French mother sauces use milk (béchamel sauce), white stock (velouté), brown stock (Espagnole), clarified butter (Hollandaise), and tomato (tomato sauce) as the liquid base for each type of sauce.

We use several mixtures for thickening sauces, including:

• Roux–a cooked mixture of equal parts of flour and fat (such as butter, oil, or meat drippings). The amount of cooking time affects the colour. For example, roux starts out white before progressing to blond and brown as it cooks.
• Whitewash or slurry–a mixture of flour and cold water
• Corn-starch–a mixture of corn-starch and cold water
• Liaison–egg yolks that have first been tempered with hot stock (so they don’t scramble) before being added to the liquid

Adding thickeners to sauces usually requires a slow, continuous whipping technique to prevent lumps from forming. Once successfully added to the liquid, all thickeners must come to a boil before they reach their full thickening and holding potential. The base stock, or liquid used for a sauce, provides much of the flavour. From here, several methods exist for enhancing flavour, including adding wine, lemon juice, vinegar, seasonings, herbs, and cheese, as well as reducing the sauce to concentrate its flavour. Wine, often used in sauces, as are acids such as lemon juice and vinegar. Seasonings such as salt, pepper and cayenne are also used to give a sauce a new flavour. Other ingredients, such as cheese, can take a bland béchamel sauce and turn it into a zesty cheese sauce.

Chefs have been taking basic sauces from the list of five mother sauces and enhancing them with different flavours and seasonings for generations. Because of the endless list of derivatives, hundreds of different sauces are possible. Once you know the basic mother sauces, you too can begin creating your own signature sauce.

I think this is a great summary of what sauces are and why they are important. This course works through the different base sauces and provide the foundation for you to build your repertoire of sauces for your recipes.