Do you want to learn how to make sauces like you’ve worked in a fancy Parisian restaurant your whole life? Maybe you haven’t thought about it at all, but you worry that your dishes come out too bland? Are you convinced that the fish doesn’t taste rich enough? Or are you just tired of cooking the same thing every week, but don’t know how to step outside your comfort zone?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should make sauces more often. You won’t be at a disadvantage if you make the right sauce to accompany the dish, and certainly fish dishes don’t come to my table without sauces. But for the untrained person the phrase “to make sauce” sounds scary: where to start, what to do, where to run… It’s another matter if it’s a skilled person – after all, sauces are as much a part of cooking as anything else, and once you’ve mastered a few basic skills, you won’t wonder which side to approach the gravy boat anymore. As a result, making a perfect sauce will become as easy as playing your favorite games at the Bitcoin casino India. Here are some useful skills that will come in handy when making sauces.
Cooking Broths
The basis of most classic sauces is broth, usually chicken broth, because it has a rich but fairly neutral flavor that is suitable for all meats and even many fish dishes. In home cooking, when we are going to stew meat, we sometimes pour water over it, but in terms of culinary science this is fundamentally wrong: by adding water, we thereby dilute the taste of the meat, and the finished dish turns out far from as tasty as it could have been. What is the conclusion? Let’s learn how to make broth!
Here are some key points:
- Take a little more water than the amount of broth you want, as it will boil over.
- If you have bones left over when you cut up raw or even roasted meat, make it a rule not to throw them away, but put them in the freezer, and cook the broth when you have enough bones accumulated. The same applies to vegetables – onion peels, carrot peels, “tired” tomatoes, stalks of greens can go to the trash, but they can wait in the freezer.
- Feel free to experiment with herbs – parsley, bay leaf and thyme are traditionally good in broth, but you can add dill for fish meals and coriander for Asian meals.
- Chop the vegetables, and ideally, chop the bones, so the ingredients give more flavor to the broth.
- Boil the broth over low heat, so it’s easier to remove the foam, and you won’t have as much.
- To remove the fat, put the broth in the fridge. This way all the fat will collect on top and solidify.
- Leftover broth is also handy to keep in the freezer, and if you don’t have a lot of freezer space, boil the broth a few times and dilute it with water when you need it.
Deglazing
When you fry meat, fish, or vegetables, small bits that stick to the bottom of the pan inevitably remain, in which the flavor of the main product is concentrated. This flavor can be extracted in a simple but elegant way: pour some liquid on the hot pan, and, after waiting for it to boil, scrape the bottom of the pan with a spatula. This technique is called pan deglazing. You get the gist, but now a little more detail and point by point:
- Fry the meat or fish you are cooking in the pan. When you remove the meat or fish from the pan, finish cooking it in the oven or put it away in a warm place.
- In the remaining fat in the pan (you can add a little oil if necessary), fry the finely chopped onion and garlic.
- Pour in the broth, juice, wine, or other richly flavored liquid, and scrape the pan with a spatula, scrubbing any burnt bits from the bottom.
- Stir the contents of the pan and let simmer to allow all the ingredients to saturate the future sauce with their flavor.
Slicing Onions
Onions are one of the most popular vegetables used to flavor dishes, regardless of the cuisine in question. Sauces are also often a job for onions – sometimes sauces start with frying them, which requires chopping them finely.
Cut the onion lengthwise, remove the husk (if the top layer has begun to darken or dry out, remove it ruthlessly too), cut off the “tail” but not the very root that holds all the layers together.
Place the bulb on a board with the cut side down and with a sharp knife make several cuts parallel to the board, about 0.3 cm apart. The cuts should go from the side where the “tail” was and not all the way to the end so that the layers still stick together.
Now make vertical cuts at the same distance from each other, also without cutting the bulb completely.
After that, start slicing the onion, gradually moving toward the stub, and the onion will be sliced into almost perfect cubes.