Sauce


In cooking, a sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi-solid food, served on or used in preparing other foods. Most sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavour, texture, and visual appeal to a dish. Sauce is a French word probably from the post-classical Latin salsa, derived from the classical salsus 'salted'. Possibly the oldest recorded European sauce is garum, the fish sauce used by the Ancient Romans, while doubanjiang, the Chinese soy bean paste, is mentioned in Rites of Zhou 20.
Sauces need a liquid component. Sauces are an essential element in cuisines all over the world.
Sauces may be used for sweet or savory dishes. They may be prepared and served cold, like mayonnaise, prepared cold but served lukewarm like pesto, cooked and served warm like bechamel or cooked and served cold, like apple sauce. They may be freshly prepared by the cook, especially in restaurants, but today many sauces are sold premade and packaged like Worcestershire sauce, HP Sauce, soy sauce or ketchup. Sauces for salad are called salad dressing. Sauces in Pakistani and Indian cuisine are made for curries.
A chef who specializes in making sauces is called a saucier.

Function

Sauces are used as accompaniments to improve the flavor of a dish. They may do this by deepening the flavor already present in ingredients or by providing pleasing complementary or contrasting flavors. Cultures around the world employ other accompaniments to the same effect, for instance relishes and stews, the latter seen in the Ethiopian wat accompanying injera flatbreads.
Cooking and then serving a sauce with a dish is predominantly a Western, particularly French, concept. With the exception of pasta, sauces in western cooking generally accompany meats and other proteins that have been subject to a simple cooking process such as frying. In Asia, sauces are integrated into the dish, seen in curries, or are used as a condiment, as in fish sauce.

History

The Latin salsus is the root etymology of sauce.

Composed sauces

Composed sauces are made in the kitchen, and are particularly important in classical French cuisine. Such sauces may be uncooked mixtures, for instance pesto and skordalia, or cooked, seen in Hollandaise and white sauces. They always contain basic seasonings, and in more intricate preparations include condiments and an intensified element of the ingredient being accompanied. A sauce made from the last is known as an integral sauce. Several basic cooked preparations, such as stocks, demi-glace and espagnole sauce may be preprepared and included in cooked sauces; these often are attempts to resemble a sauce made from an intensified element of the accompanied ingredient.

Sweet sauces

Sauces are served hot and cold in several desserts. As with savory sauces, sweet sauces are used to intensify the flavors they accompany, but they also are used to generate various contrasting elements: a tart lemon sauce is frequently paired with a sweet white chocolate mousse, smooth sauces often provide textual contrast with crunchy pastry, and in hot fudge sundaes, a warm sauce functions as a counterpoint to the chilled ice cream.

Cuisines

American

American sauces include prepared cold condiments like ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, tartar sauce, cocktail sauce, various hot sauces, and a variety of salad dressings, often used for dishes other than salad. Barbecue sauce is used both as a condiment and as an ingredient in some varieties of barbecue.
Hot sauces include gravy, and tomato sauce, often served with pasta. White sauce is widely used as an ingredient.
Dessert sauces include fudge sauce, butterscotch sauce, hard sauce, and many others.

British

In traditional British cuisine, gravy is a sauce used on roast dinner. The sole survivor of the medieval bread-thickened sauces, bread sauce is one of the oldest sauces in British cooking. Apple sauce, mint sauce and horseradish sauce are used on meat. Redcurrant jelly, mint jelly, and white sauce may also be used. Salad cream is sometimes used on salads. Tomato ketchup and brown sauce are used on fast-food-type dishes. Mushroom ketchup and strong English mustard are also used on various foods, as is Worcestershire sauce. Custard is a popular dessert sauce. Other popular sauces include Marie Rose sauce, whisky sauce, Albert sauce and cheddar sauce. In contemporary British cuisine, owing to the wide diversity of British society today, there are also many sauces that are of British origin but based upon the cuisine of other countries, particularly former colonies such as India.

Caucasian

There are many varied cuisines in China, but many of them compose dishes from sauces including different kinds of soy sauce, fermented bean paste including doubanjiang, chili sauces, oyster sauce, and also many oils and vinegar preparations. These ingredients are used to build up a range of different sauces and condiments used before, during, or after cooking the main ingredients for a dish:
  • Braising sauces or marinades
  • Cooking sauces
  • Dipping sauces
In some Chinese cuisines, such as Cantonese, dishes are often thickened with a slurry of cornstarch or potato starch and water.

Filipino

typically uses "toyomansi" as well as different varieties of suka, patis, bagoong and banana ketchup, among others.Image:Kolasås sjudandes på spisen.jpg|thumb|right|Caramel sauce

French

Sauces in French cuisine date back to the Middle Ages. There were many hundreds of sauces in the culinary repertoire. In cuisine classique, sauces were a major defining characteristic of French cuisine.
In the early 19th century, the chef Marie-Antoine Carême created an extensive list of sauces, many of which were original recipes. It is unknown how many sauces Carême is responsible for, but it is estimated to be in the hundreds. Many are included in his Art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle.
Carême considered the four grandes sauces to be espagnole, velouté, allemande, and béchamel, from which a large variety of petites sauces could be composed.
In the early 20th century, the chef Auguste Escoffier refined Carême's list of basic sauces in his classic Guide culinaire. Its 4th and last edition listed the foundation or basic sauces as espagnole, velouté, béchamel, and tomate. Sauce allemande, which is a variant of velouté made with egg yolks, is replaced by sauce tomate. Another basic sauce mentioned in the Guide culinaire is sauce mayonnaise, which Escoffier wrote was a mother sauce akin to the espagnole and velouté due to its many derivative sauces.
In A Guide to Modern Cookery, an English abridged translation of Escoffier's 1903 edition of Le guide culinaire, hollandaise was included in the list of basic sauces, which made for a list that is identical to the list of five fundamental "French mother sauces" that is acknowledged by a variety of sources:
A sauce which is derived from one of the mother sauces by augmenting with additional ingredients is sometimes called a "daughter sauce" or "secondary sauce". Most sauces commonly used in classical cuisine are daughter sauces. For example, béchamel can be made into Mornay by the addition of grated cheese, and espagnole becomes bordelaise with the addition of reduction of red wine, shallots, and poached beef marrow.
A specialized implement, the French sauce spoon, was introduced in the mid-20th century to aid in eating sauce in French cuisine, is enjoying increasing popularity at high-end restaurants.

Indian

cuisines use sauces such as tomato-based sauces with varying spice combinations such as tamarind sauce, coconut milk-/paste-based sauces, and chutneys. There are substantial regional variations in Indian cuisine, but many sauces use a seasoned mix of onion, ginger and garlic paste as the base of various gravies and sauces. Various cooking oils, ghee and/or cream are also regular ingredients in Indian sauces.

Indonesian

uses typical sauces such as kecap manis, bumbu kacang and tauco, while popular hot and spicy sauces are sambal, colo-colo, dabu-dabu and rica-rica. Sambal is an umbrella term; there are many, many kinds of sambal.

Italian

Italian sauces reflect the rich variety of the Italian cuisine and can be divided in several categories including:

Savory

For meats, fish and vegetables
Examples are:
There are thousands of such sauces, and many towns have traditional sauces. Among the internationally well-known are: