Sauce

This recipe is part of the Epicurious Online Cooking School, in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. To watch it being made, and to learn how to make other Mexican classics, check out the video classes.

This recipe is part of the Epicurious Online Cooking School, in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. To watch it being made, and to learn how to make other Mexican classics, check out the video classes.

This sweet and tangy sauce is perfect for glazing grilled meats, seafood, and veggies. It was designed for our Grilled Shrimp and Grilled Corn recipes, as part of our Gourmet Modern Menu for A Fourth of July Cookout.

This is the easiest hot fudge sauce ever. You'll be glad to know that it firms up to that chewy fudge consistency on contact with ice cream, just as you expect hot fudge sauce to do!

Homemade marshmallow sauce is so ridiculously easy to make that you'll chuckle at yourself for ever having assumed it was complicated. Making it also allows you to use pure vanilla extract, which tastes so much better than the fake vanillin flavoring in many commercial versions.

Why use frozen berries in the summer, when local fruit is at its peak? Because we love fresh local berries so much when whole or, in the case of strawberries, when sliced as well, puréeing them seems almost a sacrilege. If, however, you've got a surplus of fresh berries, go ahead and purée them.

Spread this punchy chile-herb sauce on grilled flatbread or drizzle it over grilled seafood.

Once I have grilled a piece of meat, I want to capture the flavors of the delicious juices that emerge on the cutting board when I slice it and then build upon them, so I make what I call a board dressing. I often add some olive oil, or some of the rendered fat trimmings from the baste, or perhaps a little balsamic vinegar, to the juices.

Use this orange-tinted sauce on sandwiches with salmon or cucumbers.

Serve this chunky, all-purpose tomato sauce with fish, chicken, pasta, or disks of polenta (shown here).

This is a robust dressing that is good with strongly flavored greens like escarole or spinach. It’s also very good on grilled foods and vegetables like potatoes, or as a dressing for chicken and pasta salad. Because the garlic thickens the dressing and gives it body, less oil is needed than for a conventional vinaigrette.

This simple recipe is not only great for bread-dipping, but can also be used to liven up the flavors in other dishes—as your cooking oil, or in salad dressing, or as a pasta topping, or just drizzled over grilled fish or meat.

This basic white sauce is what gives many pasta dishes, like lasagna, a rich creamy texture. It’s not hard to make and you’ll find lots of uses for it.

Every cook should have a good marinara sauce in his or her repertoire, and I think this one is just about perfect. Though not as quick to throw together as some of the other tomato sauces I depend on (see page 164 for a really quick, basic sugo), the time you invest in making it will be repaid with a full-flavored, robust sauce that can be used in dozens of different ways. The sauce freezes very well, so why not make a double batch to freeze (after cooling completely) in 2-cup portions? Frozen sauce may be stored for up to 3 months.