Sauces to give your food the 'wow' factor Years ago, when I began learning about food properly at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, one of the first things I had to learn was sauces. The five "mother" sauces - hollandaise, béchamel, mayonnaise, velouté and tomato sauce - were drummed into us like a catechism, alongside countless "daughter" sauces. Time was, this was what being a chef was all about. I rarely make these old-fashioned sauces any more. I find them too rich, the buttery sauces in particular (seeing just how much butter goes into a "daughter of hollandaise" such as béarnaise put me off forever). At home you need only have a few sauce recipes up your sleeve to enliven dozens of simply cooked dishes, adding seasoning, acidity, body and a sense of freshness, and bringing a "wow" factor to your cooking. These recipes are simple and, in the main, fast to make. A sauce can be as simple as a mixture of lemon juice and olive oil poured over a steak. But add some crushed herbs and you have salmoriglio, a sauce I used to make at the River Café, usually with marjoram, though it works with lots of other herbs too. In southern Italy it's used as a marinade rather than a sauce, but it works more than well enough. There are lots of wonderful Middle Eastern sauces, but my favourite, and perhaps the most versatile, is made from tahini. Tahini is, of course, a paste made from sesame; it's an ingredient most people know from adding it to hummus. Seasoned with crushed garlic and lemon juice and made more liquid with water and olive oil, tahini makes a simple sauce: both rich and fresh-tasting. It goes as well with grilled meat as it does with fried fish, and is rarely off the menu at Dock Kitchen. Spain can provide some wonderful sauces. My favourite by far is the Catalonian version of romesco. There are lots of versions of this sauce; it is traditionally eaten during the festival of the calçotada, in late winter, when the first of the new season's onions are eaten with the wonderful nut and pepper sauce. My version is thicker and rougher; I often fold in a little crème fraîche to spruce it up. Of course, different sauces suit different things, but it's not that hard to work out: mayonnaise with boiled meat, fish or vegetables, herb oils with grilled meats, romesco with practically anything, even toast.