Go for the gold: 20 Sauces to Change Your Cooking

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Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Victoria Granof.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

20 Sauces to Change Your Cooking

Sam Sifton

Because of a publishing error, we inadvertently sent you Monday’s newsletter. The correct one is below.

Good morning. Genevieve Ko, Yewande Komolafe, Eric Kim and Melissa Clark teamed up this week to produce an incredible collection of 20 sauces (above) to make and keep in your refrigerator all summer long, concoctions to inspire your cooking and improve your eating. It’s the centerpiece of the printed Food section we delivered to subscribers this morning, and the very definition of a clip-and-save.

The sauces are divided by type. There are recipes for green sauces: zhug, the Yemenite herb and chile sauce; an all-purpose green sauce; and charmoula, the North African relish and marinade.

There are recipes for salty-sweet sauces: Japanese teriyaki for salmon or chicken; Vietnamese nuoc cham; and Korean yangnyeom sauce, fried chicken’s greatest friend.

Also for spicy sauces: West African sauce moyo, Buffalo sauce and Chinese chile crisp.

We have tangy sauces as well: a spoonable avocado salsa; a blistered tomato dressing; pyaz ka laccha, a South Asian onion relish; and a wasabi-soy sauce vinaigrette.

Creamy sauces make an appearance, too: Thousand Island dressing, tartar sauce and fry sauce.

And of course there are sweet sauces for your all your end-of-meal needs, with recipes for rhubarb sauce, blueberry syrup, fruit caramel and a big bowl of whipped cream.

Use them with abandon! It’s the summer of sauce.

We have thousands and thousands of recipes for dishes you could adorn waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. (You do need a subscription to access them, it’s true. Subscriptions are the fuel for our stoves. If you don’t have one yet, I hope you will think about subscribing today.)

You’ll find further inspiration in this accounting of the recipes our staff cooked most in June, and on our social media channels: on Instagram, for instance, and on Twitter as well. And have you checked out our New York Times Cooking YouTube channel yet? It’s a delight. (Here’s Samantha Seneviratne making her Earl Grey tea cake.)

We will be standing by like camp counselors should anything go sideways while you’re cooking or using our technology. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise. (You can also reach out to me directly. I read every letter sent: foodeditor@nytimes.com.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with béarnaise or XO, but “A Double Life,” by Flynn Berry, about a daughter’s relationship with her missing father, an aristocrat accused of murder, is a thrilling read for the beach or fire escape.

And you should definitely consider Sam Sanders’s “Closer to the Nursing Home,” in Popula, a look-back review of the celebrity magazine Closer: “I saw a copy for the first time in years a few weeks ago,” she wrote, “and I wanted to see what it was up to now, how badly it had aged — basic ex stuff.”

Here’s Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker on how the Medici were painted by the artists they supported.

Funkadelic’s third album, “Maggot Brain,” is turning 50. The Times went deep on a before-and-after look at the music that informed it, and the music it informed, and it’s a glorious adventure to explore it all. Do that.

Finally, as a number of language teachers pointed out to me, I blew the French for the motto of the Association de sauvegarde de l’oeuf mayonnaise in Monday’s newsletter. It is “Le temps passe, les oeufs durent” (not “les temps” and not “passé). “Time passes, the eggs last.” My high school French teacher would literally rap my knuckles for that. Apologies. I’ll be back on Friday.