Sauce Making

A sauce makes water seem less watery — giving it body, cling, and the ability to carry flavor across the surface of food. Every sauce in every tradition achieves this through one or more of six physical strategies: dissolving gelatin, swelling starch granules, coagulating egg protein, emulsifying fat droplets, suspending plant particles, or trapping gas bubbles in foam. Understanding this taxonomy makes the classical French system (and every other) a set of variations on knowable physics.