A note on sauces

Sauce can be a wonderful addition to any dish. Be it a top sirloin, chicken, ham, or pasta sauces can enhance any dish. However sauces can swamp the food you’re cooking and you may lose the textures and flavors of the main part of your dinner if you’re not careful.

The Apartment Chef’s 5 Rules of Sauce:

1. Sauce is not soup. That means your meat or pasta should not be swimming in liquid!
2. Watery runny sauces are gross.
3. Patience is your friend. All sauces take time.
4. Lumps = BAD
5. Harmonize: Like in music you can harmonize with flavors. Citrus and red pepper goes well together. Apple cider and tomato paste don’t go well together.

Now that you’ve tried to think about what apple cider and tomatoes taste like together think about this classic flavor combination:

Red Wine Sauce:

1 C Red wine (whatever you have around)

1 C beef stock

1 tbs honey

1 tbs molasses

2 tsp flour

Salt and pepper

Mix the red wine, beef stock, honey and molasses in a small to medium sauce pan over medium heat.. Now comes the technical part, this is where your sauce can go very very wrong. Grab your whisk and start whisking. While whisking start adding flour a little bit at a time. A very little bit. Any more than a tiny bit and you’ll end up with lumps (see rule 4 for my feelings on lumps). Once all the ingredients have met in the pot you can slow down your whisking. Now comes rule number 3 have patience. It will seem like the sauce is still watery but let it bubble and reduce for the next 20 minutes mixing every once in a while and voila! You have a thick, flavorful, glossy sauce!

This particular sauce is great over a strip steak or a nice sirloin.

We’ll talk white sauces another day.