Rosheen Kaul takes sauce seriously, so seriously that her second book Secret Sauce is all about the stuff, how to make them, and where you might like to apply them in your life. And it’s a celebration of sauce for all abilities with some – including a fresh and familiar ginger spring onion sauce – taking just minutes to throw together. Others more confident in the condiment department might like to meet their match in the sambal section, or perhaps it’s all about finding your chilli oil end-game.
Secret Sauce is the ultimate condiment compendium for sauce-lovers of all skill levels, primed for a spot in your kitchen and ready to ramp up whatever you might be serving. Here’s author and former Etta chef Rosheen Kaul on how to make the most of her outstanding new book.
Sauce is the final flourish, it’s that last spritz of fragrance before you leave the house, the final sparkle. Sauce also hides all sins – bad carving, overcooked meat, a flavourless roast. A delightful way to layer flavours, or disperse herbiness and freshness more evenly than any herb garnish could. It can round out a dish, double-down on a flavour, fill gaps in seasoning. I have no interest in a life without sauce. Sounds utterly dull.
I wrote Secret Sauce a few months after I left Etta. It was a very different experience than writing Chinese-ish, which I wrote mostly in the hours between 2am and 5am after service, trying to wrap my brain around my first head chef job.
When Secret Sauce came around in the years after Chinese-ish, I felt I’d found my writing voice, and recipe writing was no longer daunting. I’d spent a few years cooking my own food and by then had found a clear culinary direction as well. I loved writing this book. When my publisher asked if I’d had any ideas for a second, the idea of a restaurant-level sauce-driven flavour extravaganza written specifically for the home cook came up, and I was incredibly excited to get it out of my head and onto the page. I’m pretty sure I was manic when I wrote the recipe list, and came up with over 200 recipes within a couple of hours. Some of it was nonsense, but a lot of it was just deliciously kooky, and full of personality. It just made so much sense.
The main thing I learned writing it was that I’m actually incredibly lazy when I cook at home. Nearly half of the recipes in the book don’t involve any actual cooking, mostly stirring and seasoning, but are the most reliable, delicious way to take something plain and make it crazy good. There’s a layer of guilt here that is diminished when you make a sauce to say, drizzle over KFC that you serve with white rice. Feels like a meal, no? Even though you bought the hard part. There’s nothing wrong with making just one component of your meal, and finding easy shortcuts for the rest. We’re all tired, we’re all overstimulated, but we all also deserve to eat well. Make a little green sauce for your boiled chicken breast and everything will be okay.
If you take one thing from this book, it should be a little more understanding about yourself, and how you like to eat. The book being divided into colours as opposed to any other more sensible subject areas was also a way to pinpoint distinct flavours. If you find yourself leaning towards the black and brown section a lot for example, you’re a soy sauce stan, a lover of umami and depth – and I respect that immensely. You should then take that information and use it to help you order better in restaurants, or find recipes to cook that you definitely know you’ll enjoy.
But I’d also love it if you tried making something that you find daunting. Chilli oil! Sambal! These are of course the cornerstones of my culinary universe, and learning to make and season these two powerful sauces will make you so much more confident in the kitchen. I also really, really want readers to gain confidence with seasoning their own food, being heavy- or light-handed with seasoning is so awesome.
If you’re a relatively new cook, give the ginger spring onion sauce a try. You’ve likely tried it at your local Cantonese restaurant or with Hainanese chicken rice, so you know what the finished product is supposed to look and taste like. It uses only a handful of ingredients, so minimal chopping (you can use scissors and a grater instead if you really don’t want to get a knife out), and you get to do a cool little technique with the oil that will leave you feeling very proud of yourself when you inevitably succeed.
If you’re looking to extend yourself a bit more, meanwhile, the puttanesca chilli oil is both super fun and incredibly delicious. It has a few steps and techniques – deep-frying, confit, infusing, straining, et cetera., but my gosh it is worth it. Plus I just think it’s such a cool recipe and a great one to have on hand to drizzle over all manner of things – fresh mozza on toast, on a white risotto, over anchovies with lemon, over tomatoes, on bruschetta, all the things!
And the best dish to make when you’re having a party is fried calamari with crispy shallot and yuzu tartare. One, because it gives you an excuse to hide in the kitchen for a moment to freshly fry the calamari when your guests arrive, but also because a golden pile of calamari and a bowl of zesty tartare is one of the most beautiful things you can give to people. Or you could push the boat out and do a huge platter of black pepper and curry leaf sauced prawns, and everyone can get all messy and prawny together.
If I’m having a pie, I’m having fire chicken buldak sauce with it. I feel like pies are best friends with ketchup, and the buldak sauce is the most ketchupy sauce in the book, though a little more savoury and spicy as hell.
And if I’m having nachos, I’d drench those bad boys in the cheese and bacon sauce from Secret Sauce, cover with more cheese, chopped kimchi and spring onion and call it a day.
A big ol’ bowl of crispy fries needs a bowl of warm Japanese curry and peppercorn sauce for dipping – also in my new book.
And wings? In my head I’m imagining some cruuuunchy wings with a dish of buttermilk ranch dressing split with charred tomato sambal – and you can find both recipes in Secret Sauce. Drag the wings through the sauces and it’s like this creamy, oily, kinda spicy, ranchy experience. Sounds primo.
I’ve been getting plenty of compliments on the nail art in Secret Sauce. They’re good, aren’t they! All beautifully hand-painted. Shooting sauces was potentially going to be difficult – imagine the white or beige sauce sections, they all look kinda similar. There’s always a very human element in my recipe shoots, I love getting hands into food images, I think really getting into a dish – cutting into it, stirring it, taking a bite – looks much more appealing and delicious than a flat, perfectly sterile image. I want to see sauce drips and close-ups of oils and textures.
Anyway, it made sense to get some interesting textures and colours in to help with any plainer shots with glorious nail art. Plus I never get to have nails like that when I’m cooking (for obvious health and safety reasons), but before I was a chef I always had perfect, burgundy stiletto nails. I also enjoy the implication that you can cook from this book with super long, manicured nails too. Honestly, though? I’m just a girl, and I like pretty things. It’s always nice to inject as much personality into your work as you can.
When you’ve finished reading Secret Sauce, I hope all this saucing gives you some insight on yourself, and empowers you to say, add less chilli (or more!) Everything I write is obviously adjusted to my palate. But I don’t know you, I don’t know that you’re not a fan of too much lime juice or that you don’t like too much salt or chilli.
Don’t just do what I say, it’s your dinner! Make it how you like it. But if you change the recipe and it ends up weird please don’t message me about it. Happy saucing!
