So it’s good to understand the physical
structures of common sauces, how they’re put
together and how they’re ruined.
Food Dispersions: Mixtures That Create
Texture The base ingredient in nearly all
flavorful food liquids is water. That’s because
foods themselves are mostly water. Meat
juices, vegetable and fruit purees are all
obviously watery; cream and mayonnaise and
the hot egg sauces less obviously so, but they
too are built on water. In each of these
preparations, water is the continuous phase:
the material that bathes all the other
components, the material in which all the
other components swim. (The only common
exceptions are some vinaigrettes and butter
and nut butters, in which fat is the continuous
phase.) Those other components are the
dispersed phase. The task of giving sauces a
desirable consistency is a matter of making
the continuous, base phase of water seem less