Homemade sauces, know how to prepare any?

I can prepare tomato sauce and also one of my specialties, white Gorgonzola sauce, which I make with cream, milk, butter, some onion and garlic, and of course Gorgonzola. It's my favorite sauce to put on pasta.

 

I make home made hot sauces with my electric pressure cooker and blender, and a strainer. They are fun to experiment with and a nice change of pace from the bottled varieties. They don't have quite as complex of a flavor though since they aren't fermented, but the color is way more vibrant and they are generally thicker and have more body to them in terms of texture. I just toss about a cup of cider vinegar, along with about 5 cloves of garlic, some sea salt, and liquid smoke, and a pound of hot chili peppers of choice in my pressure cooker, then cook them for about 5 minutes on high. Then I transfer everything to a blender (carefully!, with the pouring lid removed so it can vent, and a towel over top) and blend it all until smooth. Lastly I strain it through a fine mesh strainer and jar it. Lasts for months, and tastes great.

I won't mention tomato sauce since everybody knows how to make that, and there's a gazillion recipes out there for it.

A really basic BBQ sauce that I will sometimes make, at least as a starting point for a more complex recipe, or if I am simply out of BBQ sauce and need to whip up some real quick - is just ketchup, cider vinegar, liquid smoke, and brown sugar. Then season to taste. If I have some apple butter, I will throw that in there too, to give it some depth and complexity. I also like a generous amount of hot sauce in it too, and some garlic salt.

Any wine sauces I make, such as a Marsala wine sauce, or even a sauce with fresh berries and a port wine, are all pretty much the same thing - saute some shallots in olive oil and butter until soft and just a wee bit golden, then add in the wine and fresh herbs and let it all reduce, season with salt and pepper to taste. With Marsala, I will throw in a blend of sliced wild mushrooms (for a change of pace from the plain old button mushrooms, but they work fine too) and some fresh parsley at the end. For the berry and port wine sauce, I prefer blueberries - goes great with pork. I also use a little chicken stock in addition to the port wine, and some fresh rosemary. I add the butter cold at the very end to finish off the sauce after straining it and warming it back through.

Alfredo's are dead simple, just heat some butter and heavy cream in a pan until it starts to foam and bubble, shut the heat off and throw in a generous handful of fresh grated Parmesan, then stir in some fresh ground black pepper. The key is to let the residual heat from the pan slowly and gently melt the cheese. Don't cook it further over heat and don't over mix it otherwise it will make it really grainy and the cheese will separate. Home made Alfredo sauce is supposed to be slightly grainy, that's just the way Parm is, it's not a great cheese for melting. The stuff you get in the jar in the stores is just a bunch of overly processed "cheese" which is why it's smooth like plastic in your mouth. It drives me nuts when people start using Cream Cheese or make bechamel sauces as a base for their Alfredo sauce. Actually, from what I've been told a true Alfredo is nothing more than butter and parmesan - the heavy cream is an American thing.

That's not to say that I don't like bechamels, I do, and I use them a lot when making cheesy potatoes from scratch. I just whip up a batch of bechamel, let it cool, then stir it with some boiled chopped potatoes and a few handfulls of different cheeses, including cheddar & colby and maybe munster if I got it. Then season to taste and bake it until brown and golden and melted through.