How to Cook Healthy Sauces

A. It’s surprisingly easy to make rich creamy sauces without using fat, butter or cream. Here are two of my favorite cream sauce bases:

• Slow-cook onions and garlic over low heat, then blend with silken tofu and soy milk for a rich, creamy texture. When you cook the onions slowly, they release a lot of flavor that enriches the flavor of the soy. For even more flavor, add fresh herbs to the onions while cooking.
• Blend cooked white beans or potatoes with soy or cow’s milk to make a base for another a healthy cream sauce. Once again, adding slow-cooked onions will add even more flavor.

Q. What about other types of sauces that are not creamy?

A. I am particularly fond of salsas, pestos, mushroom sauces, and lighter sauces that are reduced. Following are a few easy, yet delicious examples.

• Whenever a recipe calls for a mushroom sauce, I like to add a little bit of reconstituted dried mushrooms such as porcini or shitake. It’s easy to keep dried mushrooms on hand, and they add a lot of flavor you don’t get with just fresh mushrooms. Add dried porcini mushrooms to a little tomato sauce and fresh herbs, and you have a very flavorful sauce that is quite versatile and goes with many dishes.
• A little more complex method of making a flavorful sauce is to simmer vegetables, such as carrots, onions, celery, garlic, and spices, for about 30 minutes, starting with cold water. Once you have drawn out the flavor from the vegetables, strain the broth and return it to your pan. Continue to simmer on a high temperature to reduce the sauce to about half the quantity. This reduction will intensify the flavor. If you are serving meat or fish, pour this sauce into the pan in which you just cooked the meat or fish, and it will add even more flavor.
• Salsas make a terrific healthy topping for many foods, such as fish, chicken, legumes, and egg dishes, such as frittatas, to name just a few. And salas are especially easy to get creative with, depending on the flavor you want. They lend themselves to raw ingredients as a topping with a lot of flavor. I make not only Mexican flavored salsas, but Italian, Asian, Thai, Tropical, you name it.
• Pestos are another great way to make healthy sauces. They are not only very flavorful, but the fresh herbs are incredibly beneficial medicine. Try my Cilantro Pesto with Pumpkin Seeds.

Q. What is a healthy way of thickening a sauce?

A. If you want to thicken a sauce without adding flour, a good alternative is to mix a little arrowroot with water. Add to your sauce at the end and continue to cook for just about 3-4 more minutes, giving it time to thicken. Add a little at a time, so as not to make it thicker than you want.

However, with the cream sauces I have recommended above, the silken tofu, white beans and potatoes will all thicken your sauce nicely, so you won’t need additional thickening.

Between our recipes for the WHF website and our Essential Guide cookbook, we have a multitude of healthy sauces of all kinds for you to try. For a listing of our many website recipes with fat-free, delectable sauces, click [Recipes](