Sauce Recipes From Around the World.

Learn five sauces from a country and you can cook most of its food. Sauces are where a cuisine compresses its logic — its acid, its fat, its heat and its aromatic base — into something portable that can be applied to whatever protein or vegetable the week supplies. That is why they travel better than dishes do. Mexican cooking is unthinkable without its salsas and moles, the latter running to thirty ingredients and several days of work; Argentine chimichurri does the opposite job with four, cutting through grilled beef with raw garlic and vinegar. Korean cooking runs on fermented pastes, gochujang and doenjang, that carry years of aging into a ten-minute dish. A base of tomato, onion and chile underpins an enormous range of West African stews. Peru bends everything toward its ají peppers; Georgia toward walnut and sour plum; Italy toward a soffritto so quiet you only notice it when it is missing. The recipes in this collection are worth cooking on their own weekend and keeping in the fridge, because a jar of the right sauce is what makes a weeknight dish taste like it came from somewhere specific. Each one explains the role every component plays, so you can adjust it to your own heat and acid tolerance without accidentally cooking something else entirely.

16 recipes on this route