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Welcome to “Cookbook of the Week.” This is a series where I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own.
You’ve mastered roast chicken, crushed barbecue pork, perfected your homemade biscuits, and your grandma’s recipe for tortellini is immaculate. Some folks think a good main dish is the ticket to a perfect meal, but they’re not seeing the big picture. One of the most crucial components to a stellar meal is none other than using the right sauce—but sauce from scratch is a skill set unto itself.
Sauce making takes a keen palate for balancing flavor, consideration for texture, sometimes careful emulsification, and awareness for proportions. It’s no wonder we often reach into the condiment shelf of our fridge door, no one wants to screw up a sauce. I think having a helpful sidekick with reliable sauce recipes might be just what we need. That’s why I chose Saucy for cookbook of the week.
A bit about the book
Written by Ashley Boyd, Saucy is a tantalizing book of a wide variety of sauce recipes—herby, tangy, sweet, and umami. This cookbook is made to complement, not take over your diet. Even the petite dimensions of the book signal that it’s a team player; the backup dancer that elevates your main book of recipes.
The chapters are organized by flavor profile, texture, and sometimes by ingredient, like creamy or tomato-based. One of my favorite features of this cookbook is the section in the front that gives you sauce pairings based on what your main dish is. When I set out to make lunch or cook dinner, I’m thinking of my main meal first. Am I eating dumplings tonight or salad? How should I finish off that roast chicken? Once I have that all figured out, I can flip through this cookbook and mosey over to the Chicken and Fish section of pairings and decide which of the 15 suggested sauces sounds good to me.
After you get through the multiple chapters of flavor-packed sauces and drizzles, Boyd goes a step further and supplies you with a few classic recipes in case you don’t actually have that main dish part figured out. There are recipes for pancakes, bread pudding, roast chicken, steak, and a few others.
The sauce (and dish) I made this week
I fully believe a well-matched sauce can take a meal to the next level. However, I rarely make them from scratch. (Unless it’s gravy for mashed potatoes, obviously.) So that leaves me chronically buying sauces and tending to my library of condiments in the fridge. I’ll be honest, homemade sauce always tastes better but I settle for the bottled stuff for ease.
I took this cookbook review as an opportunity to break out of my comfort zone and make myself some fresh sauce. It wasn’t easy to start; I was interested in almost every sauce I saw in this book. I had leftover rotisserie chicken to eat so I decided a sandwich would be nice. I landed on the Lebanese Garlic Sauce, and thought of all the delicious wraps and pitas I’ve had with that sort of punchy garlic sauce. Lunch was decided.
Part of the deciding factor was that this garlic sauce only required four ingredients—garlic cloves, salt, canola oil, and lemon juice—and I already had them all. To make life even easier, I used my Vitamix Ascent X5 to take care of all that finicky emulsification business. This sauce is a true aioli and meant to be bright white, thick, and spreadable like mayo, but a vampire’s nightmare. An aioli can take patience lest it break, like all emulsions. If you don’t have a high-powered blender, I recommend using an immersion blender to make life easier.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
I tossed all of the garlic cloves into the blender along with the salt and pulsed it together until it was finely minced. Then I started the process of drizzling in oil and alternating with lemon juice, scraping the sides, and repeating as the cookbook directions indicated.
I may not have picked the funnest nor the fastest sauce, but I do believe I picked the most complementary sauce for my rotisserie chicken wrap. Alone, this garlic sauce is way too strong. It’s almost harsh with raw garlic. A bad recipe? No, friends. This is exactly why sauce-making is an art. Sauce is meant to support the main dish. It needs to be strong in small doses. You wouldn’t eat hot sauce as a bowl of soup. I hope.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
I smeared thin swipes of the creamy garlic sauce along one side of my Lebanese pita bread and piled chicken, tomato, lettuce, pickles, yogurt, and harissa onto the other. I was a little worried the garlic would be too sharp, too raw, and ruin my lunch, but instead every bite was a victory lap. It’s the best version of that pita that I could have made. The Lebanese Garlic Sauce saved my lunch from being just OK. The only reason I don’t have post-lunch-sadness right now is because that recipe made about 12 ounces of sauce and I can’t wait to use it again.
A great cookbook to elevate everything you make
Saucy is a great cookbook for any home cook that’s ever had the feeling like something’s missing. That feeling that your burger, chicken wing, or salad is on the brink of perfection but it’s falling flat for indescribable reasons. You need a sauce.
The recipes in this book are largely straightforward with four to 10 ingredients and most of them are easy to find in major grocery stores. Each one gives you short procedural steps, followed by instructions on how to store that particular sauce. Sauces are powerful, so you often only need a little bit. The rest of the recipe can be sealed up in a jar to live in the fridge for at least five days and some for up to three months.
If you see yourself becoming a sauce maven, I suggest saving some jam jars so you can keep your collection organized in the fridge. Actually, a nice jarred sauce might make a great gift for Father’s Day. And why not throw in a copy of Saucy too?
How to buy it
Saucy is available as an ebook, but I insist on grabbing the hardcover if you can. It’s wonderfully compact with some really mesmerizing photography. If you have a bookstore nearby, leave the computer behind and see if they have Saucy in the cookbook section. If not, maybe they can order it for you.
