About a year ago, I got the notion that I would learn how to make sauces. I’ve always liked a decent sauce with my food, so it was beginning to bug me that I couldn’t make my own. To fill this knowledge gap, I went and bought Sauces: Sweet and Savoury, Classic and New by Michel Roux (hereafter affectionately referred to as “Johnny Sauce”).

Now, Johnny Sauce, while an excellent book on sauce making, is really more geared towards the professional restaurant kitchen. That is to say, most of the recipes in the book call for ingredients that the average home cook (such as yours truly) will find difficult to get their hands on. However, by studying lots of sauce recipes from various sources (notably Saint Delia, Anthony Bourdain, and to a lesser extent Gordon Ramsay, in his TV shows), I’ve noticed certain patterns emerging. Things that seem to be common themes among different sauces.

I intend to start posting some sauce recipes (I’m still learning, so I’ll post more as I figure them out), so I just want to share some of these general common principles I’ve discovered so far.

• Sauces are sorta time critical. Many take a good while to cook, and you must serve them as soon as they’re done. You can’t leave them lying around. So pay attention to your timing. You want to be finishing the sauce around the same time as you’re plating the dinner.
• Season your sauce with salt and pepper at the end of the cooking time. You want to taste it when it’s cooked to get the balance right with the seasoning.
• Lots of sauces require stock. Get the best you can lay your hands on. For convenience, I use the Kallo organic “just bouillon” stock cubes. You can also get pouches of pre-made stock. You can use those if you prefer, but they’re a good bit more expensive.
• Lots of sauces involve simmering a liquid with lots of bits of stuff in it, until it’s reduced to coating consistency, then straining it through a conical sieve to give a nice clear sauce with no “bits” in it.
• Get yourself a conical sieve. It really does make it easier to strain sauces without half of it going all over your counter.
• Many sauces involving stock will also include some alcohol (port, brandy etc). The alcohol is usually added before the stock and reduced for a couple of minutes, so that the alcohol boils out of the liquid, leaving you with the flavour, but not the harshness of the alcohol.
• Most sauces involving stock will require a small knob of butter swirled in just before serving. This gives the sauce a nice glossy sheen.
• Do yourself a favour and use a decent sized pot for your sauces. Those tiny milk pans are too small (although I usually strain a finished sauce into one, just before adding the butter).
• Some sauces (like Béchamel, or white sauce) are thickened using a roux. This is a mixture of flour and butter. You need to constantly stir these sauces while bringing them to boiling point. They will form lumps if you walk off and leave them. Always use Plain Flour when making a roux.

I’m kinda leaving out emulsion sauces on purpose at the moment. I’m still learning how to do those with enough confidence to write about them. Hopefully I’ll come back to them again in the not too distant future

If any of you budding sauciers out there can think of anything else, leave a comment!

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