The Cooking Cardiologist

Sauces are most notably attributed to the French and salsa to the Spanish. Sauce is the overture for the palate, while salsa is musica for the mouth. Without question, without sauces and salsas, chicken would just be chicken, a steak would always be meat and pork would be pork. Sauce is the basic foundation of food.

There are only five food types—meat, poultry, fish, dairy and plant-foods—but sauces produce an endless variety of foods. Sauces create great chefs.

Sauce recipes tend to be rich, heavy, laden with butter and cream. Healthy food can be made unhealthy with the addition of a rich sauce. Any old shoe would taste great with butter, cream, salt and herbs. Culinary schools devote hours to sauce creations and many a chef is unwilling to make a basic French sauce healthier, perhaps a violation of the sauce code-of-ethics.

However, the calories and fats in sauces can be drastically reduced by substituting ingredients. Some simple tricks to making healthier sauces include swapping out butter for plant-sterol margarine and cream for fat-free half-and-half or soy milk. For sauces and salsas that call for sugar, try using Splenda instead.

Check out my cookbook for a whole section of sauce and salsa recipes. The sauces are lighter, yet still rich and flavorful. No need to have these sauces on the side.