Sauce

This mother recipe is a breeze as long as you follow the steps and understand when ingredients are added and why. Melted together, the white chocolate and butter create a basic bond. The addition of glucose, needed for the texture it imparts, then breaks that bond. Cold heavy cream comes to the rescue, emulsifying the broken bond and forming a new, stronger bond. The pumpkin puree and seasonings are added last for flavor and additional body. Note that you must use a hand blender in this recipe, and for the other ganaches in this chapter.

This is our high-brow fudge sauce for the Earl Grey lovers out there (Mama Meehan, we’re looking at you).

I wasn’t raised on malt as a flavor, but as we expanded our little kitchen staff, Leslie Behrens opened us up to a world of malt. After many attempts at this sauce, we found the secret to a deep, dark underlying malt flavor is a splash of molasses—not enough to taste molasses, but enough to give a deep, dark depth beyond chocolate alone.

Make this glaze just before using it—it needs to be warm so that you can properly make a mess of the top of a pie with it.

This classic Argentine condiment gets a bit of a Southwestern spin, making it ideal for brisket barbacoa tacos.

John and his mother serve this wonderful sauce over roasted chicken breasts to make a delicious lemon chicken.

Phil Donaldson writes: “This Italian sauce is probably the best-tasting spaghetti sauce we have ever tasted. However, it is not very well known. The name means ‘prostitute’s sauce,’ and the story goes that the ladies would prepare the sauce and put it on their windowsills, and the smell was so fabulous that it attracted clients for them.”

This sauce is wonderful on pound cake, ice cream, and many other desserts.

This sauce makes something special out of plain cake or vanilla ice cream.

This is excellent on char-grilled chicken or pork. Swab or brush the sauce on the meat for the last 15 minutes of grilling time. Turn often, continuing to baste, to prevent burning.

To make a tasty cheese sauce for vegetables, add 1/2 cup shredded cheese.