Sauce

One of the greatest culinary weapons has many forms, methods, and uses, but one common definition.

The technical definition of a sauce is “a thickened, flavorful liquid.”

That is at once both terribly simplistic and incredibly insightful at the same time.

It’s simplistic in that a sauce is perhaps one of the most powerful tools a cook has. It elevates, complements, contrasts, refines (and sometimes saves) nearly any dish you add it to. Reducing it to simply a “thickened, flavorful liquid” seems criminally unpoetic.

Yet, it’s also perfectly true. Throughout the culinary program we’ve been introduced several times to the concept of “base + thickener/lightener” … you thicken a sauce, you lighten a mousse. In other words, it starts with the base of flavor, and then you do things to it to create the consistency you want for the purpose it serves.

That’s cooking. It’s the sacred and the profane intermixed.

Sauce Sophistication

At home, it’s perfectly acceptable to serve a dish of protein-starch-vegetable without a sauce. But in the professional kitchen, a sauceless dish is a sin.

In Bill Buford’s fantastic culinary memoir Dirt — where he lives and interns in French kitchens for several years — one of his duties was to make the staff meal. The requirements for what that meal needed to be were pretty simple… make whatever you want, as long as it has a sauce.

Sauces can elevate the most sophisticated dish to a higher level of refinement, or save a sub-par dish from disaster to acceptability.  That’s a powerful, and versatile, weapon. Think about it… how many overdone Thanksgiving turkeys have been saved by a good gravy? How many bland fish dishes have been turned around with a nice vinaigrette? Would Eggs Benedict be the popular breakfast choice that it is without the Hollandaise Sauce (pictured)?

Maybe that’s why categorizing different types of sauces was one of the first concepts codified by Antonin Carême into the French culinary lexicon back in the early 1800s — the Mother Sauces:

• Bechamel: milk thickened with roux

• Velouté: light stock thickened with roux

• Espagnole: dark stock thickened with roux

• Tomato: tomatoes reduced and/or thickened with roux

• Hollandaise: egg yolk and butter emulsification

• Mayonnaise: egg yolk and oil emulsification

• Vinaigrette: acid and oil emulsification

Odds are if you’re cooking at home and following a recipe, you’re already using one of these sauces without knowing it. But making a sauce can be intimidating if you don’t know what pieces to put together. Few recipes explain the building blocks involved in their list of ingredients or instructions.

The Forumula

Regardless of which sauce you’re making, all have a common formula: flavor + thickening. In other words… it’s a base of flavor, thickened to the consistency of a sauce.

There are six ways to thicken a sauce. In Vinaigrette, I dove into one of those… emulsification. Here’s all of them, with a little more detail.

Thickeners

Reduction

This is probably the easiest and most recognizable to home cooks. It’s simply letting a liquid simmer so that it evaporates a degree of water content, thereby reducing in volume. When a recipe asks you to “reduce by half”… that’s a reduction.

Reductions work best with sauces that contain some kind of starchy vegetable as an ingredient, as the process of reducing will draw out that starch and thicken the sauce along with the evaporation of water. That’s what makes this such an easy method.

But… it takes time. The lower the heat, the better the result. You should never boil a sauce. A low simmer is best, with the low heat slowly drawing out the flavor and thickening agents without shocking them with too much heat.

Also, reducing tends to result in a heavier tasting sauce. It loses its freshness. That’s why you often see a note to add a squeeze of lemon or other acid at the end of the process to quickly brighten it up before serving.

Examples: Tomato, Pan Sauce, Glace

Emulsification

I talked a LOT about emulsifying in vinaigrette. But what I didn’t get into was that there are different ways to emulsify a sauce. One of them is to use an animal fat (egg yolk or butter) as the emulsifying agent.

Eggs are a key component in Mayonnaise and Hollandaise sauces. They emulsify either oil (mayo) or butter (Hollandaise) incredibly effectively, and with greater longevity than a vinaigrette. The “container vs contained” concept still applies, but yolks are just more stable of a container.

The way it was explained to me is that the egg yolk acts as a sort of net. When first cracked, that net is condensed. But whipping yolks expands that net and allows it to capture the fat added into it and form a semi-permanent bond. That’s why you can make mayo and store it for weeks without it breaking, but a vinaigrette will always need a quick shake before using.

Typically, an emulsification is a core part or making the sauce. It’s not like it’s a thickening “option” you can choose to thicken something that wasn’t going to be made with and emulsion in the first place (the way these other thickening methods can).

Examples: Vinaigrette, Mayonnaise + Derivatives (Caesar, Ranch, Blue Cheese), Hollandaise

Refined Starch Slurry

This is a good go-to option to thicken a sauce that’s being stubbornly thin despite how long you reduce it. It’s simply taking equal parts refined starch and water, mixing it into a paste, and tempering it into your sauce.

Let’s unpack that a bit:

• Refined starch: think cornstarch, potato starch, or even tapioca starch. Just not raw flour. Refined starches have been processed so they’re not raw (which tastes sour). Flour needs to be cooked before added to a sauce (see roux below)

• Slurry: Mix 1 teaspoon starch with 1 teaspoon water and stir to a paste. That’s enough slurry to thicken 1 cup of water. Increase the amount of slurry as needed based on how much sauce you have to thicken.

• Temper: You don’t want to pour a cold slurry into a simmering sauce. Instead, once the slurry is made, you stir a bit of the warm sauce into the slurry to bring it to a matching temperature (called tempering) and then pour it all into the sauce.

Once done, bring the sauce just to a boil to activate the starch in the slurry, and then back to a simmer to thicken. Just be sure to stick to the radio of slurry to sauce or you risk making the sauce taste too starchy. Give it time to thicken before adding too much.

Examples: add to reductions that are too thin

Vegetable Starch

Some vegetable are naturally starchy, and thus act as a thickener. Think potatoes, onions, etc. You can make great, flavorful sauces with these kinds of ingredients, which I’ll note below.

Generally these sauces are made from equal parts solids (the vegetables) and liquid (stock, milk, etc). At most, you’d use 2 parts liquid to 1 part cooked veggies. Any more than that and you wind up with a thin sauce that needs to be thickened again.

Examples:

• Soubise: Etuve onions until sauce, blend with milk/cream, and strain.

• Coulis: Cooked vegetables or fruit pureed with equal part stock, and strained.

Roux

Ah, the roux. Most people know about roux as a component of making gumbo. But ironically gumbo roux does very little to actually thicken that stew, as roux looses its thickening power the longer you cook it. In gumbo, roux flavors more than thickens.

But let’s back up. A roux is equal parts flour and butter, cooked to a paste like consistency, and added to liquid. Cooking the flour in butter takes away the sourness of raw flour, and makes it something you can use as a thickener.

You don’t want to brown the butter or the roux. Just put butter into a cold pan and heat it until the butter bubbles and clears (ie: stops bubbling, which means the water content has evaporated). Stir in the flour. Don’t whisk. Whisking activates the flour’s gluten and makes it gummy. Use a spatula.

You also don’t need to stir constantly either. It’s done when the mixture stops smelling like cookie dough and resembles more like toasted almonds (and the bubbles get bigger too). If you can pull the spatula through the roux mixture and it doesn’t immediately combine (ie: “nape”) it’s ready. Either add in your liquid, or remove for later use.

1 oz of roux thickens 1 cup of liquid (4 oz = 1 qt).

Roux is the thickening option chefs use most, for several reasons. It’s easy. You can make roux in advance and store it to use whenever you need it. It’s stable. And it packs a lot of thickening power without affecting flavor.

Ever made a gravy recipe where it asks you to cook a little butter and flour before pouring in your pan drippings and stock? Congratulations, you just made a velouté! (A velouté is anything sauce blending a white stock in roux. Gravy, marsala sauce, etc.) Ever made mac and cheese? Great, you just added cheese to a Bechemal (milk and roux), otherwise known as Mornay. They both use a roux to thicken.

Examples: velouté, espagnole, bechamel.

Fat Mounts

Finally you can mount a sauce in fat… typically cream or butter. It’s a quick, short-term thickener you add just before serving. The longer you wait, the more likely it’ll separate. So think a pan sauce where you reduce a little wine and stock in the pan you just seared a chicken or steak in, then off heat you add butter at the last minute to thicken before serving.

On using butter… the butter has to be COLD. I mean right from the fridge cold, or even laying on a bed of ice cold. The warmer the butter, the quicker it’ll separate and not actually thicken your sauce.

Examples: reductions, pan sauces.

Notes

• On Straining: You don’t HAVE to strain. But straining is what makes the difference between a refined sauce and a rustic sauce. Coulis are strained by definition. Anything made with a roux should be strained. It’s certainly a step you can get away with skipping. But if you want your sauce to have an impact, straining packs a bigger punch than meets the eye.

• On volume: Figure about 2 oz of sauce per plate per course. If it’s a main course, do 4oz. If it’s pasta sauce, double that.

• On Thickness: Most sauces are either too thick or too thin. The best way to tell if its right is to pour some on a plate and test its surface tension. You’ll never accurately guage the viscosity of a sauce by looking at it in the pan/pot.

• On Plating: Sauce the plate and then add the protein atop the sauce. Saucing on top will turn a crispy skin soft. Obviously not the case with noodle. Hollandaise is the exception.

So the next time you’re following a recipe that involves a sauce, take a moment to read between the lines and figure out what kind of sauce it’s asking you to make. The ingredients and thickening method will almost always tell you what you need to know. And when you know the foundation of the sauce, and the thickening methods at play, you can more successfully execute the dish.