Specifically, I don’t mean a pasta sauce. Rather a sauce you might drizzle over chicken, or fish, or add to stir fry. Or a dipping sauce. Spicy sauce. Or a sweet sauce. Whatever.
I bought a new little saucepan and I want to make some sauces.
Sauce.
A quick sweet and sour sauce.
1/4 cup rice vinegar.
3 tablespoons sugar.
1 teaspoon soy sauce.
Heat to dissolve sugar. Bring just to a boil.
Add 1/2-1 tablespoon cornstarch in 1 tablespoon warm water.
Keeping stirring until thickened. It will become lumpy if you don’t.
Options: a drop or two of red food coloring; chili oil, Louisiana hot sauce or something else if you like it hot.
Here’s an interesting sauce recipe.
Ingredients:
1 bottle of ketchup
Instructions:
-
Take piece of meat. Place it on plate.
-
Invert bottle.
-
Squeeze 1 Tablespoon ketchup onto meat.
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Repeat step 2 & 3 as necessary during meal.
Interesting. I know a similar recipe, but I usually use catsup.
1 large softball sized onion, papery skin off and chopped into a blender’
2 pingpong ball sized knobs of ginger, sliced fairly finely, try to get any juice into the blender
1 cup mirin
half cup soy sauce
blenderize the bejebus out of it, then pour into a mason jar. Pop in the fridge, let stand about a month, shake daily. Strain and press the solids out and bottle, keep in the fridge.
ooo…must try that.
… but that recipe doesn’t involve a shiny new saucepan! 
Standard gravy recipe:
Melt 1-2 Tbs butter or meat drippings in pan, and shake in enough Wondra flour to make a thick-ish paste. Stir constantly, while seasoning: salt, pepper, thyme, whatever you like. When the roux has darkened a bit, slowly pour in broth, stirring constantly, then let simmer until thickened.
You don’t have to cook this sauce, but it’s good on fish, shrimp, chicken, just about everything.
We have a sushi/teppanyaki place here in Tennessee called Ichiban, and they have this “white sauce” (sakura sauce) that my wife and kids are in love with. After a few searches in teh interwebs, I found a recipe that’s about as close as you can get to it:
1-1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon melted butter
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon paprika
Dash cayenne pepper
Mix it all up and enjoy. I keep mine in a squeeze bottle I got from a restaurant supply place, and I make a batch about once a month. The only thing I’d add is to use mayo from a jar, and not from a squeeze bottle. I think “squeezable” mayo is a little thinner than regular jarred mayo, and the consistency isn’t right if you use it.
Beurre Blanc:
Finely dice a shallot. Put in saucepan with 3/4 cup of acid - you can get crazy with this, I’ve used white wine, white vinegars, blood orange juice, etc. The only thing is you want a fair bit of acidity, so if you use something like wine or juice, also add some vinegar.
Simmer this together until the acid is almost completely evaporated. Not so much that the shallots burn, but you want it to be like a pan of slightly wet shallots.
Meanwhile, cut 12 T. (a stick and a half) of butter into cubes. Put in the fridge. You need it COLD.
Now here’s the tricky part, and it’s really not all that tricky. You want to emulsify the butter into the shallots/acid mixture. The only rule is HEAT: you want very mild heat. So turn the burner down, and start adding the butter, one chunk at a time. Whisk it into the shallots. When one chunk of butter is almost melted, add the next. Keep whisking. It’ll emulsify and turn opaque. There’s a pretty good video here. They use a skillet, but I always do it in a saucepan.
Add salt and herbs, if you have any handy. Serve over seafood - it’s especially good with scallops - or fish.
Glad you asked! Here’s my favorite, it’s meant for lobster, but you could put it on any kind of fish. I might try it on white chicken someday on a patty shell or sourdough toast.
Newburg Sauce
-Wisk together 1/2 C. of heavy cream with 2 egg yolks.
-Melt 1/4 C. of butter in a pan, take the pan off the heat and let it cool a bit because you are going to stir the eggs/cream and
- 2-3 Tb. of sherry into the warm butter.
Cook on lowish heat, stirring, until it thickens; don’t boil or it will curdle. At the end, stir in 1/4 tsp. of salt, a pinch of nutmeg, and a pinch of cayenne pepper. (taste and add more if needed, you can eliminate the nutmeg or use paprika instead of cayenne pepper)
If I cook a steak in a pan on the stove I like to cook some shallots with wine and a little bit of butter in the charred drippings. A nice steak should stand on it’s own (and usually better grilled), but I don’t usually buy nice steaks. I find this makes a tasty sauce for them.
Made this for the first time the other day. It goes over Asian lemon chicken.
1/3rd cup sugar
1 Tblsp cornstarch
Juice of one lemon
3 peeled lemon slices
1 cup chicken broth
Salt & pepper to taste
Mix everything up. Put some oil in a pan. Let oil get really hot. Pour in mixture. Stir and stir and stir. When it is the right thickness, pour over whatever you want lemon sauced.
Peanut sauce is good on meat, poultry, shrimp, veggies, noodles, or anything else.
big glob of creamy peanut butter
slosh of good soy sauce
small squirt of sriracha sauce
sprinkle of ground ginger
sprinkle of garlic powder
water
Put all these things in a blender or just whisk them together in the pan. If you do it in the pan, add the water little by little. Heat, stirring often over med-low heat til thickened. All amounts are approximate, of course.
I’m going to go in a different direction than previous posters and recommend an awesome butterscotch sauce. Goes great on ice cream, pancakes, waffles, etc.:
2/3 cup of brown sugar
1/3 cup of milk or preferably half & half
1/2 cup of butter
1 large(ish) pinch of salt
tbsp of honey (optional)
splash of vanilla extract (optional)
1 egg
Combine all ingredients except the egg into a small saucepan under medium-low heat stirring until all ingredients are dissolved and well-combined. Important: Do NOT let the sauce come to a boil. If you do, the sauce will have an unpleasant, gritty texture.
Next, the egg but you can’t just whisk it and dump it in since it will cook, resulting in a gross sauce with chunks of floating egg. Instead, slowly pour the sauce into a separate bowl containing the egg, whisking the entire time in order to bring the egg up to temperature without cooking it. This is called tempering. Most experienced cooks know how to do this so I apologize if everybody already knows this.
Finally, pour the sauce back into the saucepan, whisking continuously until sauce is a creamy golden brown. Remove from heat and eat right away or store refrigerated for up to 2 weeks.
I posted what is apparently a BBQ sauce recipe here. 