Cooking is a great hobby, as well as an amazing art form. Cooking takes the simple ingredients of a recipe and brings them together to form culinary delights in a matter of minutes or hours.
If you want to learn a new skill this year while in lockdown (and it looks like we will spend quite a bit of this year in lockdown) cooking could be a great choice for you. Watching chefs on YouTube or taking an online course at home could teach you a whole lot about food and how to make the most of it – and today we want to share with you just one of the basics: sauces.
Sauces are the backbone of many dishes, and today we want to teach you how to make a few of the most simple mother sauces to allow you to up your cooking game.
Know your sauces
There are a few main sauces you will want to know about when starting out in the kitchen:
- Bechamel – a sauce made from butter, flour, and infused milk
- Hollandaise – a sauce made from egg yolk, lemon, mustard and salt
- Mornay – a bechamel with added cheese
- Ragu – a meat sauce with a base of vegetables and tomato
- Marinara – a rich tomato sauce with onion
- Volute – a sauce made from butter, flour, and stock
Build a base
When building a sauce you need to consider the base. There are 2 main bases that are used in simple sauces which you can bring into your kitchen to elevate your cooking. The first is called a Roux.
A Roux is the base for creamy sauces and involves an equal part of butter and flour. Melt the butter in a pan until just about to foam, and then add the flour in and mix this together well. This will create a thick paste upon which you could go in several directions. You could add stock for a volute, milk for a bechamel, or egg and sugar for a choux pastry. A Roux is something you need to learn how to make because it will open up a world of opportunities.
The second is a Mirepoix. This is a mixture of celery, carrot, garlic and onion which is either diced finely or food processed and then sautéed in a pan of oil for 10 minutes before adding other ingredients. This is a fragrant mixture of vegetables which forms the base for ragu, bolognese, lasagna and other sauces. It is an essential addition to your arsenal and will make a huge different to your cooking.
The flavour triangle
Every sauce should be balanced perfectly for the best flavour – and the way to do this is by understanding the flavour triangle. Every sauce should have 3 components – sugar, umami foods, and acid. When creating a great sauce you will add things such as wine to a ragu for acidity, sugar to a tomato sauce for sweetness, or soy sauce to a glaze for umami. When you taste test a sauce you will be able to add small amounts of each of these elements until you balance the flavour. If too salty; add acid. If too sweet; add salt. If too acidic; add sugar.
