Our Reader Stephanie's.comment last week on the importance of when to add butter to a sauce has sparked further comment and in particular, the need for emulsification in some sauces and vinegraites.

To continue, and without being too Chefy or Sciency, we thought you might be interested in how this works for Home Chef Hero's.

When you emulsify you are combining two ingredients together that ordinarily do not wish to mix. Think of olive oil and, say, a vinegar when you are making a salad dressing. Standard ingredients for a dressing but we immediately have a problem. The two really do not like each other.

Mustard as an emulsifier

Staying with salad dressing, all the whisking and blending in the world will not bring olive oil and vinegar together for any length of time, so we need to add an emulsifier. In this case, typically, mustard.

Home Chefs would have done this from a recipe a thousand times, using the mustard simply for flavour but we should also understand that the mustard has a role of greater need. Emulsification to bring the warring parties together.

Other emulsifiers are easily available in the kitchen: egg yolks, tomato paste, honey and butter all do the job. Just whatever you prefer and how they work in with the recipe.

Readers may have noted that we always recommend Creme Fraiche or Heavy Cream when making the sauce. Both have a high fat content, a sort of built in emulsifier that guards against the sauce separating.

So, if we have a recipe with a predictable amount of olive oil at the start and you add tomatoes, a common recipe combination, it's the water from the tomatoes meeting with the oil that gives us the problem. We will need something to bind everything together..

Tomatoes and Cream

Bearing in mind our lessons from above, a solution is to add heavy cream to stabilise the combination, bringing the water from the tomatoes and oil together and giving you a smooth even sauce. The important thing is the cream should be added over a low medium heat to give the smoothness.

That's all very well but if the recipe contains tomatoes but not heavy cream then we should call on tomato paste to stabilise the oil and water. Straight forward and we can get back to building flavour.

The interesting thing is, in our search for natural, generous flavour, most of the emulsifier's mentioned above are part of the Home Chef's order of things.

Stay well everyone

Arthur Huxley www.spiceroadspices.com.au