In a sauce is a thick liquid which may be used to add flavor to food, to moisten it and/or make it look more attractive on the plate. Sauces form an important part of traditional French cuisine. These French-style sauces are thickened with starch or roux (flour cooked in butter) and fall into two basic categories - brown sauces, which are based on demi-glace, a reduction of browned veal and beef bones, and white sauces, based on velouté, a reduction of the meat and bones of veal, chicken or both, or of fish. Also important in French cuisine are sauces in the Béchamel family, based on flour and thickened milk, "emulsified sauces", which use eggs as emulsifiers to combine normally immiscible ingredients such as oil and vinegar, and "butter sauces", in which butter fat is re-emulsified back to a state resembling the original
There are also many sauces based on tomato, other vegetables and various spices. Asian cooking uses an entirely different range of sauces.
Sauces can also be sweet, and used either hot or cold to accompany and garnish a dessert.
Some examples of sauces:
White Sauces
- velouté
- sauce Allemande
- mushroom sauce
- sauce Suprême
- sauce Américaine
- sauce Africaine
- Bordelaise sauce
- Bourguignonne sauce
- Chateauxbriand
- sauce Robert
- Hollandaise sauce
- Mayonnaise
- Béarnaise sauce
- custard sauce
- sauce Anglaise or crème Anglaise
- chocolate sauce
- cranberry sauce
- fruit sauces
- soy sauce
- fish sauce
- hoi sin sauce
- oyster sauce
- black bean sauce
- duck sauce, or plum sauce
- sweet and sour sauce
- sambal
