SAUCES

What do I look for in a dish with a sauce? For one thing, sauces need to be nice, clear, shiny, or glossy, well depending on the sauce and its ingredients. Is it okay to have a lumpy sauce? Maybe in the home kitchen and if it tastes great, it is okay, but for professional chefs, having a not so smooth sauce on a plate is not appealing at all. When people spend money on a big name dining establishment, people or customers really aren't idiots, so if the sauces looks unappealing, right off the bat the dish has some minuses going on. Now, if the tastes, the hints of herbs and spices is excellent, then they'll add some black ink to the dish. If it's not so attractive and tastes horrible, the chef's reputation is out the window. It is a difficult profession, to be on top of the game dish in and dish out, but that's the nature of the game. Cheffing is a hard job, that's why I stay out of those pro gig kitchens.

Some sauces are pretty, but if it doesn't have any good flavors, why even have it? Sauces need to be tasty, or gravies same thing, if some chef puts on sauces that's too overpowering, that's a minus also, how many times I've asked for a sauteed piece of mahi mahi, but the chef has some special sauce to put on it, like some stupid lilikoi & mint sauce. "Okay, give me that then," I'd say, only to be greatly disappointed when a nice piece of mahi mahi comes to the table and is somothered by a very obnoxious sauce that just masks the fish's true flavor.

It's easy to make sauces once you know the theory, and methods, but it takes practice to make a sauce delicious, and appealing for what you're putting that sauce on or serving it with. It's like music, some musicians don't understand that playing less notes means a lot to a song, some musicians play a lot of notes and really makes a song too busy, the old saying, "Less is more," holds true even in the culinary biz.

So happy eating foodies!