The Price of Flavor
0. The Price of Flavor
There’s sage and herbal wisdom to “Practice safe eating: use condiments.” Like Hillary Clinton, I have been known to bring sauce with me places. Why? It’s reliable. Whichever sauce I load into my portable sauce keychain bottle will taste the same today, next week or next month, so long as nothing in it expires. The same can’t be said about the food I’m lubricating.
Sauces are the great flavor equalizer. A meh burger and a great burger can be elevated the exact same way. Some sauces are handed out by the handful at fast food joints, leading to one of my favorite headlines from 2006. Others are treated like liquid gold, such as a white truffle marinara that sold for $1,000 a jar or a cranberry sauce infused with port wine and edible gold at $195 a dollop. Sauce range is absurd — and that’s what makes sauce so fascinating for me.
Let’s dive into everything sauce, starting with a very quick overview, then some pretty tables I made, and ending with me divulging my dream line of garlic and mango-based sauces. You may want to bring some napkins.
1. What Is a Sauce?
A sauce is a liquid or semi-liquid substance added to food to enhance flavor, moisture, texture, and sometimes status. A good sauce doesn’t just add to a dish — it elevates it.
1a. Sauce vs. Salad Dressing
Sauce is usually cooked, thicker, and served warm or hot.
Dressing is typically uncooked, lighter, and used cold on salads. Think Alfredo versus vinaigrette.
1b. Culinary Functions of Sauces
Sauces do more than taste good (“flavor enhancers”):
Add moisture to dry food (gravy, hollandaise)
Create contrast (e.g. sweet sauces on spicy wings)
Act as visual garnish (drizzle or dip)
Serve as brand identity (McDonald’s Big Mac sauce)
1c. Sauce Notes
This section is useless. You will learn nothing.
Is honey a sauce? It's unclear.
Is gravy a sauce? No. It’s meat tea.
Apple sauce, despite the name, is not a sauce. It’s baby food, a fruit smoothie or a dip. Big Apple's PR doesn’t want you to know the truth.
I once worked at a sushi place that mixed 1 part soy sauce with 1 part water and labeled it “low sodium soy sauce.” Technically true. Morally questionable.
I sometimes call laundry detergent “clothes sauce” and dish soap “dish sauce” because it’s a fun word that doesn’t force me to e-nun-ci-ate. Unfortunately, “sauce” is also used in incel slang to mean semen or to ask for the source of hentai fan art content. Use the term with caution.
I did not look into Arby’s Sauce, Wario Sauce or several other sauces with funny names because of this.
Nacho cheese is the most joked-about sauce of all time.
99% of the time, a “secret sauce” is just ketchup and mayo. You’re lucky if herbs show up. Thousand Island. Fry Sauce. “Special Sauce.” All lies.
Not all Sriracha are equal. It should taste like manufacturing it produces toxic waste.
My fiancée is named Marina and is occasionally called Marinara. There are no people named Marinara, even in a world with Oakley and Geoffrey. Marinara is actually just hot salsa that went to Italy, so it is a sauce.
Chimichurri is just pesto that moved to Argentina. Marina is from Argentina.
Aioli is mayonnaise with a doctorate.
Tzatziki is yogurt that joined a spa and started a wellness blog. Like hummus, tzatziki is impossible to spell in English.
Don’t put teriyaki sauce on pancakes. I know it looks like syrup but it’s apparently soy sauce that’s been through hard times.
Worcestershire sauce has been mispronounced more times than it’s been used. Brown Sauce is the UK's national condiment, but you’ve probably never heard of it if you're not English. I asked ChatGPT about Brown Sauce and she replied, “Don’t worry about it.” Basically, don’t look to the UK for culinary inspiration.
You can combine ranch dressing with ranch powder to make Super Ranch. It’s science.
You don’t want to know what Halal Cart White Sauce is. You do want to know what Hare Krishna Almond Salad Dressing is... but we’re talking sauces today.
BBQ stands for barbecue. Usually the grill, not the sauce.
If someone tells you their food doesn't need sauce, they're a pretentious assh. But if they call homemade sauces “pan sauce,” they’re probably a great cook with an even better sense of humor.
The best sauces are basically melted butter with garlic or whatever, and you get them from fancy chefs once a year. The rest of the year you settle for artificial crap with a ton of preservatives (which makes RFK Jr. sad).
2. Sauce Tables
I’ll leave discussing sauce at length to culinary experts, not me, a 30-something man in arrested development who uses sauce to mask poor cooking skills. So I decided to make tables to help you understand the key sauce details!
2a. Regional Sauces
This table is far from perfect, so you can comment your complaints. I don’t care to argue that chimichurri is solely Argentinian, when I now associate it with Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Brazilian BBQs. And I’m not going to argue that tahini is Israeli when all the Levant uses it. Also, don’t even get me started on dips that are used as sauces!
2b. Hot Sauce Peppers by Scoville
2c. Ketchup Brands Compared
I personally don’t like ketchup, but felt obliged to include it, since it’s an American favorite that people for some reason miss when they’re overseas. Sorry, people like Trump who eat Ketchup with steak, or people who eat it on eggs and things chefs would cringe at. Despite finding it too sweet, I have tons of miscellaneous ketchup packets in a drawer for when I’m out of something better.
2d. Mustard Types
Coleman’s (English) is my favorite mustard. Really burns the sinuses. Unless we’re talking fried chicken, in which case, Honey Mustard, baby.
2e. BBQ Sauce Styles
The common BBQ sauces are Kansas (sticky, medium sweet), Texas (smoky, less sweet) and Carolina (lighter color, tangy). Texas and Kansas are my faves, since I like em thicc.
But did you know Carolina is divided on sauce? North Carolina is divided into two rivals: Eastern vs. Western/Lexington (which includes tomato or ketchup). Meanwhile South Carolina is mustard based. I find Carolina inferior, their BBQ sauce included.
*I’m not including the hybrids and additional BBQ types, like the thin Japanese BBQ sauces.
3. Shoom Boom & Mango Boom
I love cooking with a lot of garlic and onion. When a dish isn’t slathered in flavor, I reach for a sauce to fix it. I’ve made various garlic sauces at home (with mixed results), while my cousin makes incredible homemade garlic sauces and fermented hot sauces that inspired me to dream big. When I’m too lazy to prep sauces, I might apply Sriracha to a bland food until it’s ketchup red.
Garlic sauces aren’t as common as they should be. Garlic is universal, bold, and most importantly, keeps vampires away. Having it in sauce form means getting to add it after cooking, making it a great option for meals where not everyone wants their meal drowned in garlic.
To capitalize on this opportunity, I wanted to design a line of garlic-packed sauces that lets garlic lovers get their fix without forcing everyone else to endure the same garlic intensity. And I suspect that in sauce form, garlic might be less pungent anyway. Garlic in Hebrew is shoom — which brings us to my dream sauce, a garlic explosion: Shoom Boom.
Mock up of Shoom Boom.
3a. Shoom Boom
Shoom Boom is a line of garlic-first sauces built for garlic lovers. Each bottle is rated with 1 to 3 garlic cloves at the bottom of the label, showing how potent the garlic flavor is, a system I call the GCR (Garlic Clove Rating). It’s intuitive: the more cloves you see lit up, the more likely you’ll need mouthwash if you ate it and now need to talk to someone.
To get more data on consumer preferences, I’d launch the “dream team” lineup:
Garlic (Vegan) Mayo (1 clove)
Garlic Mustard (2 cloves)
Garlic Ketchup (2 cloves)
Garlic BBQ (2 cloves)
Garlic Aioli (3 cloves)
Based on feedback, the company would adjust garlic levels accordingly. Even better, I dream of a website to let customers choose their preferred GCR for each sauce base. That means someone could order a 1-clove and 3-clove Garlic BBQ for their sauce shelf.
All sauces come in plastic, matte-finish bottles with flat tops, so they can stand upside down — because no one wants to fight for the last drop. Each new sauce base could spark a new promo. Shoom Boom is a playground for garlic lovers.
3b. Mango Boom
Not everyone loves garlic. But U.S. hipsters, ne'er-do-well(-ers) and farmer’s market attendees are catching on to mango habanero hot sauces, which are riding the aftershock of the wave made by hot honey (my other go-to item to ask visitors from the States to bring over). I love a good mango. Enter: Mango Boom.
Mango Boom is sweet, spicy, and mango-nificient. While Shoom Boom is bold and utilitarian, Mango Boom is more sophisticated, premium, and made for moments that deserve to be memorable.
The goal of Mango Boom is to span global influences with just three bottles. In addition to mango habanero’s growing popularity, mango Thai sauces and mango salsas have existed for years in fusion restaurants. It’s mango’s time to go mainstream.
The starting lineup includes:
Mango Habanero Hot Sauce
Mango Thai Sweet Sauce
Mango Salsa
Each sauce has a unique application. You might spoon mango salsa onto nachos, squeeze mango habanero hot sauce over a taco or hot dog, or drizzle mango Thai sweet sauce on a dessert. Hell, you might just spoon one of these directly into your mouth while hiding behind the fridge door. No judgment.
4. Sauce-y Thoughts?
I wont judge. If you've got a favorite regional sauce, a hot take on hot sauce, or an idea for a Shoom Boom or Mango Boom variation you want to see, leave a comment. I want to hear what you’re saucing, smothering, dipping, or straight-up drinking out of the bottle.
Let’s normalize bringing your own sauce to restaurants.
Need more food related content? Check out my rant “Nitpicking Foods!”
