Sauce Making Skills

SAUCIN' UP YOUR SKILLS

Desiri Wightman, RD

I've read that you can disguise the toughest meat, overcooked vegetables or pasta, or even a slightly over-done cake with a good sauce. Whether that rings true or not, time in my kitchen has yet to tell. I do know that I recently served a scrumptious brown sugar sauce alongside some very squishy squash to my in-laws, husband, and children . . . not your typical squash eaters. They devoured their sauced squash, and then I consumed the remaining sauce!

Learning to make sauces certainly is a basic in cooking. Mastering the techniques behind five entree sauces, in particular, opens an entire new realm of recipes, as these become the base for hundreds of simple to complex sauces. The five magic sauces include béchamel (or white sauce), veloute sauce, brown sauce, tomato sauce, and hollandaise. Knowing what to serve these sauces on, under, or with is also another talent acquired by wonderful cooks. But, first, good cooks learn how to make the foundation of sauces-stock!

We'll touch on all of these topics in this newsletter in three segments:

Part I: Stocking Up
Part II: Sauce Elements
Part III: Five Basic Sauces

Realize, however, that there is so much information to learn about sauces that you could go to a cooking school just to learn how to be a saucier. If you'd like to expand your sauce-making repertoire beyond the scope of this article, look into some of the fancy cookbooks at your local bookstore or library, or enroll in a cooking school. You'll find an array of information to boost your status from home cook to gourmet chef.

* DVO welcomes your kitchen hints and cooking or nutrition questions! Email us and we'll post your hints and Q/A's in upcoming newsletters! *