When cooking at home in your own place you will often use things like a salad dressing or a sauce to add flavour to the dishes that you are making, however, have you ever wondered what the actual difference is between a dressing and a sauce is?
A sauce according to the Oxford dictionary is defined as “a liquid or semi-liquid substance served with food to add moistness and flavor” whereas a dressing is a sauce for salads that typically consists of oil and vinegar with herbs or other flavorings. So essentially a dressing is just a specific type of sauce used for salads.
The most common types of dressings used are vinegarettes which usually are a combination of oil and vinegar but there are also cream-based dressings that are commonly used in some things like potato salads and coleslaws. Because of the nature of the ingredients, they tend to be blended together rather than cooked like most other types of sauces.
Additionally, sauces tend to rely upon having a main fruit or vegetable on which the sauce is based such as tomatoes or apples. To provide additional flavor many sauces have vinegar added, however, sauces made with vinegar also have a longer shelf life.
The reason for this is that vinegar is an acid that lowers the pH which inhibits the growth of bacteria and therefore extends the shelf life of most sauces. Another common ingredient associated with sauces is also the addition of sugar which is not often found in dressings in large quantities.
What Types Of Sauces Are There?
Sauces can be generally divided into two major categories mother sauces and derived sauces. Mother sauces are sauces that are created from scratch and can be used by themselves or they can be modified further to create derived sauces which are those that are based typically on the blends of mother sauces.
An example of a mother sauce is mayonnaise which can be used to create a range of other sources such as thousand island dressing or various coleslaw and potato dressings all of which may be considered derived sauces.
Within this group of sauces, there is also a range of different ways to classify them either based on their physical temperature being either hot or cold or alternatively how they are created.
Dressings commonly fall into the group of emulsified dressings which means that they usually consist of some sort of emulsification of two different liquids irrespective of whether it is a mayonnaise-based dressing or a vinaigrette. Emulsified dressings by nature are cold dressings that do not require any heat to create them. An example of emulsified dressings is the french dressing which can be made by combining one teaspoon of dijon mustard with 2 tablespoons of vinegar, 6 tablespoons of olive oil, a pinch of sugar, and salt.
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