Can’t find a sauce you like from the store? Making sauce from scratch is much easier than you think
With a bowl of chopped lettuce and tomatoes waiting on the table, Everett resident Julie Stult searched her fridge high and low for her favorite salad dressing.
With it nowhere to be found, she decided to make her own dressing and since then she has refused to buy it from the store.
Stult now exclusively makes salad dressings and sauces from home. With just six months of experience, this small endeavor quickly turned into a hobby for her. She intends to start her own business to start selling her sauces soon.
“I have so much fun with it, it’s not like store-bought sauce,” Stult said. “You can customize it and make it just how you like.”
It’s such a simple yet essential element of food that can make the world of difference. To bite into something dry and bland is such a disservice to taste buds — that is where sauce comes in.
Registered dietitian nutritionist and founder of Namaste Nutritionist, Frances Arnold said people like sauce because of its “creaminess, the mouthfeel and how easy it is to chew.”
“It makes food just glide down your throat and that can be really satisfying,” Arnold said.
Elevating your experiences with food all starts with the seemingly small parts of a dish, such as sauce. Arnold said many people tend to skip over making their own sauce because they think it is too time-consuming or seems too complicated, but it’s actually much simpler than people think.
Instead of buying packaged sauce from the grocery store, making sauce at home can be a cheaper, more flavorful and exciting experience.
“Sauce and salad dressing can be so expensive in stores, it’s really worth it to make your own sauce and then splurge on something else,” Arnold said.
According to Allrecipes, most sauces and dressings only require a few ingredients that most people already have in their kitchens. Garlic aioli only has five; mayonnaise, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper. Or a simple salad dressing has only seven; olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Italian seasoning, lemon juice, garlic salt and pepper.
“Homemade sauces can be much better for you, store-bought sauces can have inflammatory and rancid oils that can make you feel worse,” Arnold said.
Using fresh ingredients will not only add another layer of flavor to food but also be better for heart health and inflammation.
Depending on someone’s dietary needs or restrictions, making sauce from scratch can also be an awesome way to modify food while making it more robust and flavorful.
Third-year Western student, Julia Vreeman is a big sauce lover and says she can easily tell when a sauce is packaged versus fresh.
“Freshly-made sauce can trigger those visual and olfactory cues, like smelling the ingredients makes it much more appealing than grocery store sauces,” Vreeman said.
Vreeman recently discovered the world of making your own sauces on TikTok.
“It looks so fun, I love seeing people put cilantro, garlic, olive oil and spices into a Magic Bullet and blend it up,” Vreeman said. “It looks a lot more appetizing and much simpler than you might expect.”
Torie Wold (she/her) is an opinions reporter for The Front. She is a second-year student, majoring in Visual Journalism. Her work focuses on creating an open space for students, faculty, and community members to be able to share their experiences and views on current news. You can contact her at toriewold.thefront@gmail.com.
Torie Wold (she/her) is an opinion reporter for The Front. She is a second-year student, majoring in Visual Journalism. Her work focuses on creating an open space for students, faculty, and community members to be able to share their experiences and views on current news. You can contact her at toriewold.thefront@gmail.com.
