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A sauce is a thickened liquid that can be used to add flavour to food, to moisten it, and/or to make it look more attractive on the plate. The term sauce comes from the French sauce of the same meaning, from Latin salsa also of the same meaning, from sal, "salt". Related words: "saline", "salad".
Sauces in French cuisine
Sauces form an important part of traditional French cuisine. French-style sauces are thickened with starch or roux (flour cooked in butter.) The 19th-century French chefs Antonin Carême and Auguste Escoffier evolved an intricate methodology by which hundreds of sauces were classified under one of five (or six) mother sauces from which all others are made.
Sauces in other cuisines
Sauces and condiments also plan an important role in the cuisines of many other countries:
- British cooking: Gravy is a traditional sauce used on the traditional roast dinner, comprised of roast potatoes, roast meat, boiled vegetables and optional Yorkshire puddings. Apple sauce and mint sauce are also used on meat. Salad Cream is used on salads. Ketchup and brown sauce are used on more fast-food type dishes. Strong English mustard (as well as French or American mustard) are also used on various foods, as is Worcestershire sauce. Custard is a popular sweet sauce. Some of these sauce traditions have been exported to ex-colonies such as the USA.
- Asian cooking uses an entirely different range of sauces. Chinese cuisine is known for sauces made from preserved ingredients - fermented soy bean, fermented black beans, various chili oils. South East Asian cuisines such as Thai and Vietnamese use sauces made from fermented fish. Asian prepared sauces are not thick as they do not contain thickening agents such as flour or butter. The thickening occurs in the last minutes of cooking when thickeners like corn starch or arrowroot are added.
Sauce variations
There are also many sauces based on tomato (such as tomato ketchup and tomato sauce), other vegetables and various spices. Note that ketchup can be based on vegetables or fruits other than the tomato.
Sauces can also be sweet, and used either hot or cold to accompany and garnish a dessert.
Another kind of sauce is made from stewed fruit, usually strained to remove skin and fibers and often sweetened. Such sauces, including applesauce and cranberry sauce, are often eaten with specific other foods (applesauce with ham; cranberry sauce with poultry) or served as desserts.
Examples of sauces
White sauces
Brown sauces
Béchamel family
Emulsified sauces
Butter sauces
Sweet sauces
Hot sauces
Asian sauces
Other sauces
Also see:
Condiment - Coulis - Custard - Garum - Ketchup -Kochujang - Mustard - Salad dressing - Salsa - Toenjang
References
'SAUCE is also an acryonym for Standard Architecture for Universal Comment Extensions, a metadata protocol for tagging ASCII text files and other files which generally center around BBSes created by Tasmaniac of ACiD [1] (http://www.acid.org/info/sauce/sauce.htm).
da:Sovs
de:Soße
fr:Sauce
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