Creating a signature sauce for your business – Steric

To help your business stand out from the crowd you should consider signature sauces for your café, restaurant or hospitality business. Sauces greatly enhance dishes like burgers, sandwiches, seafood, meat dishes, and more.

By offering something a little different from the standard sauce you will show your customers that you put time and thought into developing the menu items.

Signature sauces can keep customers coming back for more because they know you’re offering something a little different. Some large restaurant chains have developed signature sauces that have proved so popular they produce them for sale in their own outlets, or even as a product on supermarket shelves.

A signature sauce can help turn a recipe into a signature menu item and create a new classic or specialty that only your business can offer. Taking time to develop your own signature sauces will elevate your culinary image and help support premium pricing.

The role of sauces in the kitchen

Sauces are simply thickened liquids used to add richness, flavour, and moisture to a dish. Dishes that are drier, like grilled meats, roasts and many more are often enhanced with sauces and gravies.

French food is renowned for its sauces. The French call them ‘Mother Sauces’ because they use milk (béchamel sauce), white stock (velouté), brown stock (Espagnole), clarified butter (Hollandaise), and tomato (tomato sauce) as the liquid base for each type of sauce.

Mother sauces date back to the 18th Century, when lack of refrigeration caused foods to spoil much faster. It is likely the sauces were created to cover up the flavour of less-than-perfect meats, poultry, and seafood.

Fast forward to the 21st Century and the concept of ‘mother’ sauces has stood the test of time as they are incredibly versatile and provide the foundation to build dozens of other sauces.

“Signature sauces can keep customers coming back for more.”

How to develop your own signature sauces

Some foods are perfect as they come, and some will benefit from having a little something added to them. You can use fully prepared foundational sauces like Steric’s range of Sunshine sauces as building blocks for your own signatures, adding value and uniqueness to your menu.

Take tomato sauce, for instance, often used on a burger, it can be turned into a unique signature sauce with the addition of other ingredients and flavours.

Spend some development time in your kitchen, adding different elements to create something new and uniquely your own. And don’t just think about the flavour profile of your sauces, also focus on the texture, viscosity, or even the temperature.

Give your chef some extra time to experiment by starting with a few basic foundational sauces, encouraging them to use techniques and methods to vary and customise them.

Rather than starting from scratch, you can adapt one or two foundational sauces in myriad ways, cutting down on waste, inventory, preparation time and labour. Having your own signature sauces that are used across multiple dishes also means you will be cross-utilising ingredients while enhancing consistency and keeping food costs down.

“The Sunshine range of premium sauces by Steric Foodservice can be used to create irresistible flavour.”

Steric’s Sunshine brand of sauces make a great foundation

Whether preparing a fish, poultry, meat or meat-free dish, a sauce can add depth of flavour and character to your menu items. The Sunshine range of premium sauces by Steric Foodservice can be used to create an irresistible flavour in your dishes that will have your customers talking about you long after they’ve finished their meal.

All Sunshine premium sauces by Steric Foodservice are gluten-free, and our range includes Sweet Chilli, Hot Chilli, BBQ, Hickory Smoked BBQ, Soy, Worcestershire, and of course, Tomato. Steric also produces private label food products for the biggest supermarkets in Australia and New Zealand.

Find out more about the full range Steric of sauces available through our distributor network.