The Hospitality Guru (cooking) Back to Basics: Consistency of Sauce
Consistency of a basic sauce
The consistency of a basic sauce will depend on the purpose for which the sauce is intended to be used. In general, there are two types of sauce consistency – coating (sometimes called masking or napping) and pouring.
Pouring consistency must be no more than that of single cream. The sauce should merely coat the back of a spoon and run off freely. Jus lie, just roti and demi-glace are sauces of a pouring consistency.
A sauce of coating consistency is thicker than a sauce of pouring consistency. It is similar to thickened cream and should thickly coat the back of a spoon. Veloute, hollandaise, béchamel and béarnaise are examples of sauces of a coating consistency.
However, there are exceptions. For example, sauces used for binding food need to be considerably thicker than a coating consistency in order to bind the food.
CAUTION: The consistency of a sauce must be judged at serving temperature, above 85C degrees.