Saucy Talk – How to Spice Up Your Dinner Plate

Just how easy is it to deliver lots of flavor – pure flavor – without tons of fat or some kind of chemical concoction, like super-activated MSG?

This is a question that cooks from the first human village to NY’s Greenwich Village have been asking for millennia.

The answer has often been to sauce things up.

Condiments as the root of all flavors.

In the US, three basic condiments have reigned supreme since the advent of canning:

1. Mustard
2. Ketchup
3. Mayonnaise

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Mustard, a sturdy little condiment that adds a little bitter to the mix, has many incarnations, but basically, is ground up mustard seed, and has been used for flavoring since Biblical times. Because ground mustard often contains no milk or egg and is easy to preserve, mustard is a compliment to many and varied cuisines. The yellow American version is visually interesting, but that is about all.

Ketchup, a new world product made from assassinated tomatoes and often further sweetened by added sugar, is a colorful antithesis to mustard. Love it or hate it, ketchup has been added to dull foods for years so as to make them palatable.

Mayonnaise, a fat-laden, cholesterol coma inducing condiment has been made for centuries in France, and has a much wider application there than here. American versions are blander and less creamy, and sometime not even mayonnaise at all.

All three of these condiments have been undergoing many changes recently – gourmet styles, spicy, garlicky, artisanal.There is no end in sight to what can be done to make the Red Yellow and White of the picnic table more interesting.

Other sauces of importance

Béchamel and béarnaise are old standards in the kitchen, and they certainly add flavor, depending on who is preparing them.The former is basically scalded milk and cooked flour, and is the base for many other sauces (especially cheese sauces). It is creamy and has been served with meats and casseroles for 400 years.

Its cousin, béarnaise, is made with egg yolk, butter and shallots cooked in tarragon vinegar. Tricky to prepare, and the mother of many culinary disasters.

Related sauces – the Creole roux, which is flour cooked in fat and then thinned with stock, usually chicken. Roux is the sauce base for much of the Creole and Cajun cuisine of southern Louisiana.

All of the above are used to add or introduce new elements of flavor into a dish (or onto it, as the case may be).

We’ve seen them before. We hate when cooks cheat and use cornstarch to thicken things quickly. Often times, these sauces are cloying or bland.

What’s New In Flavor:

Foam. That’s right.Foamy flavors permeating dishes and lending color and texture to dishes that might otherwise be predictable.

The secret to foam as a sauce is that is virtually pure. Need carrot flavor? Cook the carrots, purée and then aerate them. You don’t need to add fats or other calorie-delivery substances.But how does one aerate boiled carrots? Ah, the secrets of a professional kitchen and a canister of compressed gas.

At home, if you have a food a food processor and some unflavored gelatin, you can cheat by making an airy mousse. But it can’t be heated. Nevertheless, a mousse can be a great addition to a savory dish. Think about it, and see what springs to mind.

Let me know what creations you have tried recently. Some are winners and some are losers, but the trying is fun.

Tags:   flavors, foam, food trends, mustard

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Posted on 10/12/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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