Sauces are gaining some importance in restaurants in this country, mostly in the best of restaurants which may be considered fine dining, where kitchens hire saucier chefs that specialize in the art and science of making world class sauces as a important ingredient of a meal.

However most restaurants here serve generic sauces; the typical brown sauce always thickened with corn starch because the cost of making a roux is high ad time consuming, the garlic sauce (typical), the mushroom sauce (whew) and the incomparable 'White sauce'! Why are we Indians obsessed with thick gummy and pasty sauces with our 'conti' meals, incessantly ordering more and more bowls of poorly prepared - corn starch thickened - Maggie cube seasoned - sad excuse for a sauce. I don't get it; don't people have a discerning palette? Haven't they tasted good sauces with their food? Whatever the reason I intend on changing that and hopefully teaching you how to make simple great sauces to go with a fantastic gourmet meals that you will cook for yourself and loved ones, at home.

A good chef believes that good sauces are the pinnacle of all cooking, both in the skill they require and in the interest and excitement they can give to food. Very often, the most memorable part of a really fine meal is the sauce that enhances the meat or fish. A sauce works like a seasoning. It enhances and accents the flavor of the food; it should not dominate or hide the food. Sauces are as valuable as salt and pepper. A simple grilled steak is made even better when it has an added touch, something as simple as a slice of seasoned butter melting on it or as refined as a spoonful of béarnaise sauce. nearly all braised foods are served with sauces made of their cooking liquids, and basic pan gravies, favorites everywhere, are made with the same techniques as the classic sauces.

What is a sauce?

A sauce is a combination of three basic components; 

Liquid

Thickening agent

Flavoring agent

The liquid makes the base or body of the sauce, most classic sauces are made with one of the five given liquids or bases resulting in 'Mother Sauces'

White stock - Chicken, Veal or Fish for Velouté sauces

Brown stock - for brown sauce

Milk - for béchamel 

Tomato plus stock - for tomato sauce

Clarified butter - for Hollandaise 

The thickening agent or starch should be used to make the sauce thick enough to cling to the food and not runny or watery ending up in a puddle in the plate and most importantly not thick like gum paste you'd find at a hardware store. Flour or maida is the most commonly used starch in a sauce, cornstarch, arrowroot, waxy maize, instant or pre-gelatinized starch, bread crumbs, and other vegetable and grain products, like potato starch and rice flour are also used. 

The liquid used as the body of the sauce provides the basic flavor, however other ingredients are added to the basic mother sauces to create hundreds of smaller sauces or variants. These flavoring agents give the finished character to the classic sauces, I of course promote experimentation to create new flavours once you've learned the building blocks of classic sauces.