Day 10: Sauce
My Impression:
First off, before I began reading this section, the expression that always came to mind whenever I thought about sauce for anything was this gem from Anthony Bourdain:
An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.
It is possible that some version of that originated with some other chef or some other restaurant critic or food writer, but it’s Bourdain’s version I think of most. While what he said is not untrue, the sentiment is far too limiting of what sauce really is capable of. Ruhlman writes:
Sauce is a fundamental part of a dish, not an accessory. And that’s how you should think of it. Sauce completes a dish, adding succulence, seasoning, and color to something that, one hopes, is already delicious. That’s how you turn something good into something fantastic. (p. 192)
Continuing the conversation into different types of sauces, including a few recipes that are sprinkled throughout the essay, this is particularly useful for reference later. In fact, I am liable to take a highlighter to these pages so I can easily find the gems of sauce recipes that didn’t merit their own single page.
This section is another example of taking something that I thought I knew at least a little bit about (it is not a foreign concept to me to make a sauce from pan drippings, for example), and it still managed to open my eyes to new techniques and ways of looking at sauce. Even though I knew that sauce can add all kinds of depth and such to any given dish, I still would mentally put it into the “accessory” category. Ruhlman made me see that I should not be so dismissive of sauce.
Recipe: Tomato Sauce
Finished tomato sauce. (c)2013 Reese M.
This is something that I have attempted many, many times before on my own. I have a habit of flying completely blind when it comes to certain types of dishes. Making tomato sauce was one of them. I would occasionally reference recipes online and in my many cookbooks, but I never truly followed any of them…not even in my usual “tweaking” kind of way. I just thought that I could wing it and learn on my own.
I have managed to make my own version of tomato sauce a few times, but it is nothing truly extraordinary. I decided to attempt the recipe for tomato sauce in this book because I felt it would be a good idea to throw out some of my bad habits and start with a clean slate where this particular dish is concerned. Plus, it forced me to work with onion again.
Okay, I admit it. I pulverized the onion - but only because it was suggested that the tomatoes can be puréed with a wand blender in the pot. I figured as long as I’m puréeing the tomatoes…
This is the first time I made sauce without using wine or tomato paste. It made for a lighter sauce, which was a nice change of pace. On the other hand, I think I messed it up by simmering it with the cover on the pot, as it came out a bit on the thin side. No matter, it was delicious.
I checked Ruhlman’s recipe for tomato sauce on his blog: he blends the onions and tomatoes.
I started making tomato sauce like this about 15 years ago. It started with a “quick” recipe that simmered for 15-20 minutes. Basic sauce is butter OR olive oil, onions OR garlic, a pinch of salt, maybe some red pepper flakes and maybe a pinch of sugar. It simmers at least 15-20 minutes and up to an hour. The sauce can be used “as is” or be the basis for a number of other sauces.
That first sauce came from a cookbook about getting weeknight meals on the table in a timely fashion. You put water on to boil for pasta and started the sauce. The sauce was simmering before the water boiled. It continued to simmer while the pasta cooked. It ended the purchase of jarred sauces for me.
There’s probably an exception to this that I can’t remember right now, but I don’t think I use tomato paste in any tomato-based sauces.
Yeah, I can’t remember where I saw a recipe that called for tomato paste. I know that I saw it somewhere along the line, which is why I began using it. It was never much – like 1/2 of the small can of paste for a rather large batch of sauce.
I liked this sauce better than my previous attempts, as it did come out “sweeter”, if that makes any sense. It tasted more like the tomatoes, rather than the natural tomato flavor hiding somewhere in the background. Next time I’ll try simmering with the pot lid off, as I think it would have thickened up a bit more by having some of the water simmer off of it.
I have several friends who don’t like onions. It turns out all of them like onions in flavor, but not texture. One trick I use when cooking for them is to grate it. Just a thought.
I’ve never tried grating it, so that’s a pretty good option without having to pull out the wand blender every time. I’m trying to also make friends with onion powder, using it as a way to figure out how to balance flavor in some dishes. It’s kind of a baby-step compromise, but it’s way more than I was willing to do even a few weeks ago.