5 Essential Sauces for Any Budding Chef
When you first learn to cook you’re keen to perfect a superb steak, a great piece of fish or really crispy roast potatoes. You get upset when you get it wrong and beat yourself up for over/under cooking your little masterpieces. Then you realise something: none of these dishes are anything without an awesome sauce.
Think back to the best meals you’ve ever had and a great sauce is more than likely to feature. Sometimes you might not even have noticed how important it was to the enjoyment of your meal. But if you think about it long enough you realise that, while you might not have missed the sauces at the time, you’d certainly miss them if you had the same meal again without them.
So before we start thinking about how to make really fancy sauces that blow the socks off your dinner guests (that’s for another post) we could do with going back to basics to perfect the five best sauces that any budding chef needs in the culinary armory. I had to use good old trial and error to get all of these right, but now that I have, I know my other sauces are all the better for it.
If you’re anything like me you always used to get your tomato sauce out of a jar. But once you perfect your own sauce you’ll never have it out of a jar again. You make it in batches for freezing too. I like to make mine with nothing more than a tin of plum tomatoes, garlic, basil, olive oil and red wine. But this recipe I found looks solid.
I know what you’re thinking. This isn’t a sauce, this is a gravy, right? I will defend a good gravy to the end. For me a great gravy is the ultimate sauce. There’s nothing to beat it. Which is why I have taken to always throwing a load of extra veg and garlic under the chicken while it’s roasting, before adding a couple of pints of chicken stock, mashing it all up then putting it through a sieve as you’re about to serve. Check out this Jamie recipe for a gravy master-class.
OK, this one needs a little patience. Do you have your whisk at the ready? To succeed with a white sauce is a great skill to have. But don’t worry. It’s not one only your Mum can make, you can make them too. As this little recipe demonstrates. The other good news is this sauce is very adaptable. Just add cheese, herbs or other seasoning according to the dish you want to create.
Now we’re showing off a bit. This isn’t exactly a staple of the kitchen. But everyone loves a good béarnaise sauce. Mainly because its made up almost entirely of butter, which goes really well with meat or fish. Crack this one and you’re on to a winner. You’ll want to make it all the time.
That steak we mentioned before is simply going to love this. You think about a really rich and tasty red wine sauce as a restaurant only treat. But red wine reductions are actually pretty easy to make. Yes you need a bit of time and you need to show the sauce a little love. But the result lifts your meal to a whole news level. I like to use port when I make wine reductions for extra depth and sweetness. I’ll sometimes put in a splash of red wine vinegar or balsamic for a bit of extra tang as well.
Photography: Slice of Chic, mjhoy and robbplusjessie.
I think I had to learn more than four sauces at catering college!!!