how to make a delicious sauce. (2024)

Kartik Das

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next favorite food

I’ve learned that a sauce can make or break most dishes and makes people want to lick their plates clean (where appropriate). Sure, ingredients play a part in determining flavor, but if you nail the technique, nothing is stopping you from greatness. Let me condense one of the most important culinary school lessons into a formula that you can repeat at home to become your own saucier.

Follow these five simple steps, and every time you taste your final product, you’ll be smiling from ear to ear. Sear your protein to create deep flavor, deglaze the bits of flavor stuck to the pan, cook the sauce sufficiently, reduce the sauce to intensify flavor, and enrich it to achieve that velvety finish.

to fry meat quickly at a high temperature to brown and lock in flavor

disclaimer — you can also sear vegetables to achieve a similar effect, so everywhere you see a protein mentioned, you can substitute vegetables.

I’m brown, so naturally, I think browning is sexy. Browning the star of your dish, whether that be a prime cut of protein like a rack of lamb or a secondary cut like short-rib or ox cheek, adds flavor to the meat and later will add depth to your sauce. So essentially, make sure you brown it nicely, do me proud.

We’re looking for a lovely brown crust (don’t burn it), which occurs when high heat comes into contact with proteins or sugar (the Maillard reaction). To enable good coloration, ensure that whatever your browning has been well dried either with a paper towel or by resting uncovered in the fridge for 30–45 minutes. From there, make sure your pan and the fat you’ve chosen are hot. Always test with a small piece of whatever you’re cooking to ensure the pan is hot enough. As soon as your trimming hits the pan, you should hear sizzling — now that your pan is hot enough, put in the rest of the protein.

Once your protein is in the pan — do not move it around. Let it cook undisturbed to form a nice brown crust. If you’re using stainless steel or cast-iron pans, the protein will naturally lift from the pan when sufficiently browned, so leave it alone until it’s ready.

Once you’ve seared the meat, you can either finish cooking in the oven or braise it in the sauce. Either way, once you’ve cooked or seared the meat, remove it from the pan and keep it warm for later.

cook aromatics — While this might sound self-explanatory, here’s where you determine the flavor of your sauce with vegetables. Using the same pan that you seared your protein in, remove any excess fat and sweat your base vegetables (onions, carrots etc.). Since you’re browning the protein, you’ll also want to brown your vegetables to extract as intense a flavor possible. All you’re looking for here is a nice caramelization on your aromatics because they’ll continue to cook as your sauce journey progresses.

to release the caramelized bits on a hot pan by adding liquid

Most people skip this step and clean out all the delicious brown bits (suc) from the searing process stuck on the bottom of the pan. Or worse, they end up burning the suc, creating an irreversible trace of bitterness in the sauce. As my culinary school chef says, “you pack it up and start again.”

When you sweat your vegetables, you can start removing those delicious brown bits from the pan by scraping hard with your spatula. Still, the easier and tastier way to do that is by deglazing — which means to remove those bits with the addition of a liquid.

Wonder why you see chefs on TV using wine or cognac in their dishes? Deglazing is a big reason why. Here is a beautiful opportunity to add layers of flavor to your sauce. You can deglaze with any alcohol — my preferred choice because that means whatever I don’t use to deglaze I pour for myself. Alcohol also adds flavors like malt/coffee from dark beer, red fruit from a bold red wine, or a sweet/acid punch that comes from using brandy or cognac. And if adding alcohol isn’t an option for you, don’t fret; you can add anything from water to stocks to vinegar or even sodas (if it works for the dish).

Once you’ve scraped the suc off the pan, increase the heat to evaporate all the alcohol, and intensify the sauce's flavors.

to develop flavors through controlled heat & (separate liquids from solids)

At this point, you’ve incorporated flavors from the meat, the aromatics, and your alcohol, and now you can choose how you want to cook the rest of your dish.

add herbs & spices — Bay leaf, saffron, turmeric can all be added now to develop the flavors of your dish
add liquid — Liquid is the medium to continue cooking and extracting all the flavors from your ingredients without burning anything. Use stock, juices, wine to allow all of your ingredients to slowly cook until you’ve reached the flavor you want
add back meat — For tougher cuts of meat, add it back to braise in your sauce. This adds loads of flavor to the sauce with the added bonus of the connective tissue in the meat breaking down, which adds shine to your final sauce

Cook your sauce (with or without meat) on simmer and keep tasting until you like it — typically, a sauce requires at least 20–30 minutes of cooking. Remove any meat and set it aside somewhere warm while you finish your sauce. Strain the rest of your sauce using a chinois or muslin cloth to reduce and enrich it more effectively.

Here you have another decision to make — would you like texture in your sauce (all the bits of veg you’ve cooked in the liquid), or would you like a smooth sauce? If you chose to keep the texture, don’t throw away the solids you’ve strained out aside from any leaves or stalks (thyme, bay leaf, etc.) and re-introduce them to the sauce at the end. For a very smooth sauce, discard strained bits, and for a slightly thicker sauce, blend the strained bits and add back to your sauce.

note: You’ve cooked your aromatics and herbs in the sauce for quite a bit, they aren’t going to have very much flavor or nutrition left in them. So they shouldn’t count as the “vegetables” in your final dish — just in case you were looking to play that card.

to thicken consistency & intensify flavors by simmering or boiling

Let’s take stock (pun intended) — you’ve cooked your meat, you’ve cooked your sauce, and now you’ve strained it. Depending on how much liquid you used, you either have something quite runny or a little thicker. If you like the consistency — don’t reduce it further; move on to the last step!

Now you get to adjust the consistency to something you’d like and intensify that flavor by doing nothing more than increasing the heat and letting your sauce reduce. Reduction essentially looks to evaporate as much liquid as possible, so don’t worry about taking that sauce to an intense boil. Once the bubbles on the surface of your sauce become larger and pop slowly, you know you’ve taken the sauce pretty far, and it’ll become thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold.

The beauty of reduction is that you get to adjust based on how you like your sauce — some people like a coating consistency (slightly thick), some dishes call for a jus (thinner), and some call for a broth (even thinner) — you do you :)

If you over reduce — aka take your sauce to a caramel — don’t fret, add water and mix over heat, and you’ll have a sauce again! Keep in mind that if you plan on enriching your sauce (next step), you will typically thin out the sauce a little, so reduce accordingly!

to make your sauce awesome-r by adding fat to finish

I know that if you’ve followed the steps this far, your sauce already tastes fantastic, and you can go ahead and dig right into it with your perfectly seared meat and whatever sides you had in mind.

But I know you’re looking to take your dish to its luxurious and fitting end, so let’s enrich it with butter or cream. To finish the sauce, take your hot pan off the heat and whisk in cubes of cold butter one or two at a time until they melt. Your sauce will increase in volume, shine, and flavor in the most magical ways. You can also add room temperature cream and whisk into the sauce off the stove. If you’re feeling particularly bougie, you can do both but always introduce the butter before the cream.

Get creative here — if you’re doing a seafood sauce, you can chop up anchovies or dill, make a compound butter that you chill, and then use it to enrich the sauce. For Indian dishes, you could make a curry leaf or coriander compound butter to finish your sauce — the possibilities are endless!

note: the one thing you cannot do is heat your sauce once you add butter or cream — you will split your sauce into a rather unfortunate mess, and you won’t be impressing anyone.

And there you have it — you’ve now got the base formula to make any sauce you’d like, and as long as you keep tasting it to adjust for seasoning, you’ll be eating very well. I’ve used this technique to make everything from bolognese to chicken curry to black pepper steak sauce to classic French beef bourguignon. The rules don’t change even if the proteins, the vegetables, the spices, the alcohols, and the fats range from simple to complex.

Give it a shot; either take a dish you’ve made before and follow my formula to see if it changes anything or try something completely new and trust the process. I guarantee that as long as you don’t try to combine crazy ingredients (and even then), you’ll have a delicious sauce that you could charge a reasonable price for at a restaurant — or spoil your guests. Who knows, you might even end up making your next favorite food.