At More Than Gourmet, we know that adding a sauce to a food—like roasted chicken or poached fish or sautéed vegetables—completes it. Sauce can take your dish from ordinary to superb. Imagine that roasted chicken smothered in a savory mushroom sauce, or the fish with a zigzag of creamy lemon sauce, or the vegetables with a glaze of buttery herb sauce. It’s all about the sauce.
When you don’t have an afternoon to spend in the kitchen making a complex, multi-layered sauce from scratch, you can achieve the same result with our White Wine Sauce. It’s what we call a foundation sauce, good on its own, but also versatile enough that you can make creative additions that transform it in minutes. Our white wine sauce is a ready-to-use classic velouté (a sauce made with flavorful chicken stock and thickened with a small amount of flour and butter) enriched with white wine.
Why the white wine? For one thing, it contributes its characteristics to the sauce. The wine’s color, aroma, and complex flavors all take the sauce to a new level. Wine also carries and enhances other flavors. It actually helps release flavor molecules in foods and assists in dissolving fats, allowing the flavors of other ingredients in your sauce to intensify. Other liquids, like stock or water, and fats, like olive oil or butter, cannot do this.
What do you do with our White Wine Sauce? We have a few ideas:
- Make a classic French sauce in minutes. Swirl some tomato purée into White Wine Sauce and then whisk in some butter to make a Quick Sauce Aurore for chicken, veal, fish, or vegetables. Simmer a minced shallot and some herbs in white wine, then add White Wine Sauce to make a Quick Chivry Sauce for seafood or egg dishes. Cook some minced garlic in butter, then simmer it in white wine and add White Wine Sauce, plus some chopped tarragon and a little cream, and you have an elegant Tarragon Cream Sauce that’s perfect over roasted salmon or seared pork medallions.
- Need a simple garlic sauce for pasta or a dipping sauce for bread?  Add some quickly sautéed garlic and a pinch or two of herbs to White Wine Sauce and you’re done.
- Create a delicious chicken entrée by sautéing some onion, mushrooms, and thyme, and adding White Wine Sauce, cream, and chunks of tender cooked chicken. Simmer the sauced chicken for a few minutes, then ladle it over crisp puff pastry shells and garnish with some snipped fresh chives.
You probably have a few ideas of your own for our White Wine Sauce, too. The beauty of it is that this sauce gives you the perfect canvas for creating your own custom sauce—something that goes perfectly with the meal you’re serving. That’s what a good foundation sauce does.
