Getting Saucy!

Sauce making is a cornerstone to successful cooking. A sauce can either make or break your dish. Ages ago, when food preservation techniques were in their infancy, sauces were used to mask the foul taste of spoiled food.

This is because the sauce is the first taste sensation your mouth experiences prior to masticating the main item. And even then, the flavor of the sauce is intermingled with the food. Nowadays sauces are used primarily for flavor, moisture, texture and color.

Sauce making is a broad topic, deeply entrenched in French culinary history. Marie-Antoine Careme (1784-1833), a practical demigod of classic French cuisine, was the first to systematize the "mother sauces" and their derivatives.

Mother sauces, otherwise known as the grand sauces, include demi-glace, (a reduced brown sauce), veloute, (a roux thickened white stock), béchamel, (a roux thickened milk sauce), tomato, and hollandaise, (a decadently rich butter and egg yolk sauce).

From these fundamental sauces, countless secondary sauces are then made, such as bordelaise, sauce supreme, béarnaise, and Mornay to name a few. The advent of nouvelle cuisine sparked a movement away from rich, heavy, roux-thickened, time consuming sauces to lighter and simpler creations.

Competent sauce making requires significant dexterity in two key areas. The first is the acquisition of the requisite culinary skills. The second is the expertise in knowing suitable sauce/food pairings; much like marrying a food with a wine. Preparing sauces and properly uniting them with the appropriate foods are yardsticks by which chefs are judged.

In regard to matching sauces with food, there are some general guidelines. When a cooking technique produces drippings, (as in a roast), or a fond, (the caramelized residue on the bottom of a sauté pan), they should be employed to make a sauce.

Countless pan sauces and gravies begin this way. Likewise, if a liquid is employed to cook the food, as in a braise, or a court bouillon for poaching fish, some or all of the liquid can be incorporated into a sauce.

However, sauces are also made independently of the food. Here the flavor profile of the sauce and the target food is even more critical. This includes secondary seasoning elements in both, particularly herbs.

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