Getting Saucy In The Kitchen

My DH is a meat and three veg kind of guy. Actually two veg: potato and corn. Not that there is anything wrong with meat and veg, I like it too, it’s easy to prepare and cook, and it’s healthy, but sometimes it gets a little boring. Adding a sauce can change that.

A good sauce lifts a dish from the ordinary to gourmet and you don’t need to buy expensive bottled sauces or packet sauces full of additives, or spend hours making a French style reduction to get a great tasting sauce for your steak.

One of the easiest meat sauces is made from the pan juices of pan fried or seared meat. After removing the meat and with the pan still hot add a little acidic liquid like wine or a little lemon juice or vinegar. Let this boil, scraping up and mixing in all the good bits on the bottom of the pan. Pour any juices from the resting meat into the pan, season to taste and pour over your meat. This takes about a minute or two to make while the meat is resting. You can flavour your sauce with some herbs or mustard or give your sauce a bit of richness by adding some butter at the end. For Marsala sauce use marsala and butter.

A variation to this is of course, the classic gravy, where flour is first added and mixed into the pan with the meat juices and stock is then added to form a sauce. This can also be flavoured with a little wine and seasoning. Again you can add some herbs or mustard for flavour.

Another variation is to use cream. My favourite cream sauce for pork steak is adding a little crushed garlic to the pan after cooking the steak, adding some white wine and letting it boil and reduce for a minute or two, then stirring in some seeded mustard and cream. Again this whole process only takes an extra couple of minutes. If I’m lazy or cheap, I just use cream and mustard.

For a mushroom sauce, fry off some mushrooms in a little butter after removing the meat, then add a little wine or stock and reduce, or if you prefer a mushroom gravy, remove from pan, make your gravy above then throw the mushrooms back in. Alternatively, cook you mushrooms and add a little white wine and cream for a creamy mushroom sauce.

If you happen to have brandy and Worcestershire sauce hanging around in the cupboard, then you have the beginnings of steak Diane. Again in the same pan as the meat, fry off a little garlic and finely chopped onion or shallot in some butter, add a little brandy and cook off for a few seconds, then add a little Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce and cream. Season to taste and add some fresh parsley if you have it.

White sauce is also nice on meats and vegetables, especially corned beef and all it is is just butter, flour and milk. Melt the butter, add the flour and cook for a minute or so, then stir in the milk slowly. Cook until thickened, stirring. Season with salt and pepper and a little nutmeg, or add cheese for cheese sauce or mustard for mustard sauce. White sauce also forms the base of many dishes like lasagne or tuna mornay or macaroni and cheese. 

And for bangers and mash, you can’t go past an easy onion jam. Cook a sliced onion in oil over very low heat in oil until caramelised, stirring occasionally. This takes about 10 – 20 minutes but you can do it while you’re cooking everything else. Stir in about 1 Tbsp of sweet chilli sauce, 2tsp vinegar 2 Tbsp of water and cook until thickened – about 2 minutes.

For fish, a really easy but oh so gourmet tasting sauce again uses wine. Add dry white wine to the pan after frying the fish and let it reduce so there is only a tablespoon or two. Then add a good amount of butter and stir to melt. Season with salt and pepper and finish off with some freshly chopped parsley.

An even easier fish sauce is garlic aioli. Just stir some crushed garlic into some good quality whole egg mayonnaise and serve.

But my all time favourite is hollandaise. People want to make out that hollandaise is difficult to make, but it’s actually quite easy and only takes about five minutes to make. I’ll post a recipe for our homemade hollandaise sauce (ed).

I’ve only touched on the endless variety of sauces that you can whip up quickly to add a bit of pizzazz to your meal. Apart from steak Diane, these sauces are ones that we use on a regular basis. They are just as easy as the packet variety without the added extras like preservatives.