Sauce can work on many things: steak, fried chicken, cakes, salads. (I feel like as a whole people overlook that salad dressings and frostings are sauces. They totally are.) And I think because there are so many different variants, people get confused sometimes about how to make a good sauce. The key to a perfect sauce, in my opinion, is one that contrasts with the textures and flavors of the food it is served with.
A good sauce should accent the dish to make it better, not overpower it. However, I recognize that there is a popular trend to make the sauce the star of a dish. You especially see that these days in restaurants, whose only claims to fame like in their "secret sauce." (We can get into the marketing behind that later.)
In every food, one should find balance. Too much of one thing is not necessarily good. There's actually a pretty easy way to figure out how to balance your sauce and your dish. See, in graphic design, one rule that all designers know from the beginning of their training is that thick and thin fonts should be used together, rather than two thick fonts or two thin fonts. If you have two thick fonts or two thick fonts, the reader is not sure where to look first, and so the main point gets lost.
Consumers of food -- I mean, typical, everyday, no-culinary-training-at-all consumers of food (like me!) -- don't necessarily know which part of a dish they're supposed to focus on. So your food needs to tell them that. To do that, you have to make sure your sauce and dish are balanced.
Sauces come in many different thicknesses: from runny balsamic vinaigrette all the to fluffy mayonnaise. I made a chart to represent the thickness of sauces. Since it is based on the pH scale, I consider ketchup to be like water in a sense: perfectly in the middle at 5. Not too thick or thin, just as water isn't an acid or base, and it works with pretty much anything. On the far left we have our runny sauces, and on our far right we have our fluffy sauces.
Once you've figured out how thick your food is, you can determine how thick your sauce needs to be. For example, I consider salads to be very thin as far as foods go, because they are light and easy to chew. To make the salad the star of the dish, one must compliment it with a thick sauce, such as ranch. Now, that's not to say that it's horrible to have a salad with a thin dressing (in fact, I think that tastes amazing), but when a salad has a thin dressing, one finds one's self focusing on the dressing more than the salad itself. Like, no one's ever really raved about a particular ranch dressing, but people will rant about how much they love a good fruit-based vinaigrette. Because when you pair a thin sauce with a thin salad, you confuse the consumer to whether they should be focusing on the lettuce and vegetables or the dressing.
Let's use another example. Fried chicken has a very thick taste to it, because it's fat and filling. So if you want the fried chicken to be the main star of the dish, you should pair it with a thin sauce, like hot sauce or a thin barbecue sauce. However, many chicken restaurants (in an attempt to stay relevant) offer signature thick sauces to set them apart from other chicken restaurants. But then it is no longer about the originality and taste of the chicken, but rather, the sauce. The sauce becomes the star, because the balance is thrown off.
Now, I'm not shaming anyone's star sauce here. In fact, I don't really mind a lot when the sauce is the only thing I can focus on, because I loooove sauce. But from a culinary perspective, it seems kind of useless to market a particular food only to have everyone focus on the sauce. "Why did they only love my frosting?" we question ourselves, "Why did they not compliment my moist and delicious cake?" Well, now you have my answer to this.
Keep this scale in mind as I go on to review sauces.
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