Sauce

Sauce and gravy

A good sauce or sauce can elevate any right to perfection. It can add balance and extra flavour to the dish to highlight the individual ingredients. I have to confess that I am a real sauce pig, and it is a gene I have passed on to my children, who often sit with a spoon and “shovel” in. When you embark on the art of making sauce, there are plenty of tips and tricks you can take advantage of. Here’s a little bit about what I think is important when making sauce.
1. Good ingredients
Whether it’s the herbs, the vegetables, or the wine, it’s always important to find some good ingredients. The sauce is a reduction and concentration of the flavor elements, and I believe that the quality of the ingredients you use matters in the end. So the first tip is that you think about the quality when shopping. Of course, this does not mean that you have to buy yourself poor in the expensive raw material, but you can easily find good products for sensible money.
2. Homemade fund, or the “easy” solution.
There should be no doubt at all that a fund made from scratch just tastes better, but having said that, it is also perfectly okay to resort to the easy solution and use ready-made broth or foundation.

A perfectly honest sauce can come out of a broth cube, and I also often choose that solution myself. But when the sauce needs to be something special, it requires work from scratch!

Few of us there with a busy everyday life have time to spend a lot of hours cooking foundation from scratch, but I would definitely recommend trying to throw themselves at the project for a weekend. You can freeze it in portions and save it for later. Second tip is a little ambiguous if you have the time, try with the homemade fund, you will not regret it! If you do not have time, buy a ready-made fund, or use one of the then “forbidden” dice.
3. Baked sauce
A baking or roux, as it is called in jargon, is the base for many sauces. We know it from parsley sauce, brown sauce, basic sauce to tartlets, etc. A baked sauce is therefore a basic sauce that can be turned in many directions.

You melt butter in a saucepan and add flour, I usually use half of each. Then it should be prepared until the taste of flour is gone, it takes 3-5 minutes. Then you gradually add liquid, it can be water, milk, foundation until you have the desired consistency on the sauce. Then you can taste with various spices.

A roux can be either light, golden or dark, depending on the cooking time before adding liquid.
4. Smoothing sauce
The above baking is a smoothing, but there are other ways to smooth sauce. Maizena (cornstarch) mixed up with a little water, it’s super-fine and you avoid lumps in the sauce. Just be careful not to get in too much! Use a portion of water and stir it together. Then whisk it in the sauce little by little until satisfied with the consistency. Remember to taste until after the sauce has been razed!
Emulsion
An emulsion is a mixture of 2 liquids that cannot be dissolved in each other. A hollandaise or bearnaise are good examples of emulsions. In these 2 recipes, whisk clear butter into the yolk, added to other ingredients. It forms a lot of microscopic drops in the sauce that give the thick creamy texture. a mayonnaise is also an emulsion. If you haven’t tried making bearnaise in sous vide,then it’s a super easy way to make the sauce.

When you whisk cold butter in a sauce to round off the taste and smooth it a bit, it is also an emulsion.
Taste to all the time
When making sauce, be sure to taste at all times! Every time you add something to the sauce, the taste changes, so it is important that you taste it. That’s how my love of food started, I sat on the table in my grandmother’s kitchen and tasted the sauce when she was in the kitchen.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with the ingredients! Replace thyme with rosemary and immediately you have a completely different sauce, these are relatively small things to do.
Salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami
The 5 basics. It is combinations of the elements crisscrossing that give the flavors of all the wonderful sauces you can make. A really good taster for sauce is gastrics, it is a concoction of caramel and vinegar and sometimes also wine. It has elements of bitter(caramel), sweet and sour, the umami taste you can get from a bit of soy, and then season with salt.
Tips and tr coke for sauce and gravy

Season to taste, all the time!
Find the right sauce for the dish to be served