SAUCES IN GENERAL
Sauces are essential parts of the world's cuisines. A sauce is simply a very flavorful liquid that is used to complement or to contrast the rest of the dish, and they also add moisture, texture, and visual appeal. Succulence of sauces is desired in dishes that use "dry" ingredients, e.g. chicken or fish, as well as ingredients that become dry due to the cooking technique. Visual effects are also desirable sometimes, whether it's just shininess, colors, or a nice presentation on the plate.
There are many kinds of sauces, and we describe the basics of sauces on our HOW TO pages. It is crucial to get the basics up your sleeves first before starting making more advanced sauces. A recipe that you encounter may make use of one of the basic sauce-making techniques that we cover on our webpage, so it is comfortable to know the real fundamentals, be aware of the pitfalls and know how the end result should be. When you see a sauce recipe, no matter how fancy or strange name it may have, there are good odds that it is based on a certain basic sauce-making technique that you can learn from us. So, learn the basics first!
On this page however, we will describe the, shall we say, metaphysics of sauces. We want to give you a general advice on how to use sauces with any dish, how to choose which sauce to make, and which effects to look for.
As said above, sauces can either complement or add contrast to a dish. It all depends on combination of the flavors and textures between the dish and the sauce. In many traditional cuisines, certain kinds of sauces are paired with certain kinds of dishes. For example, in French cuisine you can eat tender and flavor-poor chicken meat with a chicken velouté sauce. Velouté is based on broth of an animal (in this case chicken) which is concentrated into a more flavorful liquid, so when it is served with the chicken meat, it intensifies and nicely adds to the chicken flavor. Many sauces that are used to complement the dish are made of concentrated liquids of either roasted or poached parts of the main meat ingredient of the dish. Such is the case with the Brittish gravy, just to give an example. All cookbooks are full of such sauce recipes as well. These are the basics of cooking! The aim to strive for when pairing sauce and dish is to not let either of the two dominate over the other. A strong sauce cannot be served with a delicate dish, and vice-versa. A delicate fish like halibut is nicely complemented by a delicate creamy fish sauce, but this very same sauce wouldn't work as nicely with a strong-tasting fish like tuna or anchovy.
Sauces can also be made to contrast or "contradict" the dish, just to give a somehow exciting sensation in the mouth. The point of course is not to create a huge difference of flavors. It works more on the basis of introducing flavors that are in the same league but are missing. To make it more clear, let's take a classic charcutiere sauce as an example. Charcutiere is a very sharp sauce, made of mustard and pickled greens. It is served with pork, which already carries a rich taste. Charcutiere is able to bring out more of the pork flavor, but it wouldn't have worked with a more "tasteless" meal because it would be too dominating.
When you work with sauces, remember to keep them at the correct temperature (as described in our HOW TO pages on making sauces). Make sure that the volume of the sauce is proper for the dish - it should not drown in sauce because it is mainly a complement to the dish and not to dominate.