The Saucier · Sauce
Sauce Tomate (Classical)
- Intermediate
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 100g salt pork or pancetta, diced (Escoffier's opening move, omit for meatless, add 2 tbsp olive oil)
- 1 onion + 1 carrot, diced; 3 garlic cloves
- 1.5kg ripe tomatoes, chopped, or 2 cans best-quality whole peeled
- 1 tbsp flour (the classical thickener; heresy in Naples, law in Paris); bay, thyme, pinch of sugar
- Mother #4: the only mother with two passports, French and Italian
Equipment
Blender
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outMashing & puréeing
The words inside
Meringues: French, Swiss, ItalianSieves: Chinois, Tamis & Food MillFF&E, Smallwares & Opening InventoryBoning, Fillet & the Butchery Blades
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the pork; sweat onion and carrot in the fat; garlic briefly.
- Dust with flour; tomatoes in with herbs and sugar.
- Classical road: cover and BAKE at 150°C, 1 h: oven heat cooks it evenly with no scorching, Escoffier's own trick. 60 min
- Pass through a food mill (not a blender: the mill leaves body, the blades make foam); season.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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