Saucy Meals – Sauces and sauces that fix the flavor and how to prepare them
For many kids growing up in the 1960s, a favorite and easy meal was beef on toast. Mom made a white sauce and cut up some packaged ground beef and added some fresh peas. Try it with your children and have them toast the bread. Many of us don’t get around to making dips or sauces very often, but it’s really not that hard.
The key to a good sauce is in the thickening. You can use flour, cornstarch, or arrowroot as a thickening agent. If using flour, it’s best to mix it with fat at room temperature to create a paste. The fat can be butter or cream cheese or the fat that drips off the meat if making a sauce. Be sure to simmer any flour-based pasta for a couple of minutes to cook out the flavor of the raw flour. Do this before adding to a sauce to thicken or before adding milk, soup base, or other sauce liquids.
A roux is a mixture of flour and fat in equal amounts. It is used to darken a sauce. The sauce is then added to the roux. The recipe is to mix 1 tablespoon of flour with 1 tablespoon of warm fat for every half cup of liquid that you will add to the thickening paste.
If you use cornstarch or arrowroot as a thickener, you don’t really need fat. Simply dissolve any of these dry compounds in cold water. Handle them with care, as over-stirring can backfire and actually thin rather than thicken the sauce. A little salt or sugar will help break up the thickening mixture.
If your sauce is spicy, add just a little to the thick cornstarch or arrowroot mixture to warm it up before adding it to the rest of the sauce. The thicker the mixture of cornstarch or arrowroot with water, the thicker the sauce will be. You can use milk if you don’t have a sauce and want to make a white sauce. Mix 1 tablespoon of cornstarch or arrowroot with 2 tablespoons of cold water for every cup of liquid.
You can flavor a sauce or white sauce with basil, cayenne, celery seed, chervil, chives, curry powder, horseradish, marjoram, nutmeg, sorrel, or tarragon. Add salt and pepper to taste or add cheese to make a cheesy sauce. You can make a very easy and tasty sauce for broccoli, cauliflower or other vegetables by melting a little butter with prepared mustard. Cheddar cheese is a great addition to this and will thicken the mixture.
Dip garden tomatoes in boiling water for half a minute and peel. Cut them up and puree them to get a sauce. Fresh pureed tomatoes are a great addition to any slow cooker recipe or homemade spaghetti sauce. Red sauces are often ranked as a healthier option than white sauces, which contain more dairy and therefore more fat.
There is no need to buy all those packages that contain a lot of salt and “unnatural” flavorings. All you need is flour, butter, and a saucepan. Even if you’re making a red sauce, it’s less expensive to buy pure canned tomato sauce and add your own herbs and seasonings than it is to buy the sauces prepared in a jar. Look at sauces as an opportunity to experiment or use up all those spices you’ve been stockpiling in your drawer. In the time it would take you to go to the supermarket, you can make your own sauce or gravy at home. The best thing is that you will know what it contains!
