My Best Sauce Recipes
I think the best definition of a sauce is a liquid based condiment used on or in other foods to add a flavorful,
colorful and textural appeal to the main ingredient of a dish. Many years ago, sauces were primarily used to disguise
partially spoiled food in times before good refrigeration and other food preservation methods were available.
Today our needs for sauces can focus on flavor and appearance and not on improving rotten
food. A good sauce can complement flavor for meats or top off a vegetable dish. It can provide
something to dip our food in, adding a bit of fun to any meal.
Classic French sauces are mostly built upon milk, cream, butter, eggs, with or without flour,
and many more are based on meat based stocks. I’m thinking of Bechamel for a milk-based
sauce, Hollandaise for a sauce built on butter and eggs and pan sauces made from deglazing
meat juices after cooking in a cast iron pan.
But of course there is much more to the world of sauces. Asian cuisine for example, often
uses fermentation to make sauces from soy beans. Soy sauce, hoisin sauce and sweet/spicy
bean sauce are all made in this way as is the Korean doenjang. In Thai and Vietnamese cooking,
the sauce most often used is fish sauce which is made from fermented anchovies. You will see
fish sauce used as an ingredient in many of my Asian recipes, including pad Thai and red curry
Thai style. Other Asian sauces are made from tamarind juice or coconut milk.
I didn’t know how many sauce recipes I had until I sat down to think about it. My newest sauce recipe is my
brandy cream sauce that goes with chicken and it is my daughter’s favorite.
Many of the most popular Indian dishes use a flavorful sauces such as the tomato and cream based sauce used in
my butter chicken recipe. This is a terrific sauce that gets mopped up with rice and Indian breads even after the
chicken is gone – there are never any leftovers!
I think fruit sauces get neglected in Western cooking. There are only three ingredients in my cranberry sauce
which is normally made only during the winter holidays but really could be made any time of year if you freeze some
extra fresh cranberries for later.
The simplest sauce recipes I have are the ham glaze and honey glaze for carrots. Both are classic comfort foods
and the easiest sauces to make. The trickiest sauce of all to make is my traditional pan gravy recipe. It takes some
practice to make delicious gravy that is not too greasy or watery, but this recipe has all the troubleshooting tips you need
to get it just right.
Just select one of the sauce recipe buttons at the left of this page and enjoy!