The Chefs’ Cheat Code for Instantly Elevating Any Dish

There are a lot of restaurant techniques that are impractical at home. The structure of a professional kitchen, with its crew of dishwashers, prep cooks, butchers, and brigade of chefs, is a big part of what makes great restaurant food great. While you may make the effort to go above and beyond for special occasions at home, most weeknight meals cannot—and should not—involve time-consuming and advanced prep and sauce-making steps. And I hope to God you’re not pulling tweezers from a front pocket to perfectly set that last microgreen on Wednesday night’s tuna noodle casserole.

But one thing many restaurant dishes feature—and home cooks could learn from—is more than one sauce or condiment on a plate. On the surface, it sounds like an annoying suggestion. Multiple sauces? Who’s got time for that! But two or more sauces or condiments are often no more work than one—it’s all in how you approach it.

Why Multiple Sauces Are Many Times the Fun

Let’s use an imaginary tzatziki-type yogurt sauce as an example. Made the standard way, it’d involve mixing yogurt with grated or minced cucumber, garlic, olive oil, some lemon juice or vinegar, and let’s say this version also includes dill. That’s a beautiful sauce.

But we could break it up. We could make a more basic yogurt sauce with garlic and a splash of olive oil, separately mince or blend the dill into olive oil, and soak the finely minced cucumber in vinegar for a few minutes to lightly pickle it. The work is basically the same, we’re just assembling the same parts a little differently. Is it better than mixing them all together for a more classic tzatziki? No—but broken apart, those same flavors bring contrast and dimension to the plate.

Imagine these hypothetical component sauces now on a plate with a piece of seared cod. On one, there’s a sploosh of tzatziki alongside the fish. No complaints, right? But on the other, there’s a range of colors: white yogurt, green-yellow dill oil, and cool-green cucumber pickle with a dash of its vinegar. That provides visual pop. Texturally, there’s more going on too—by breaking the sauce apart, the herb-oil component retains its oiliness, the yogurt is extra smooth and creamy, and the cucumber gives a pleasant, tender bite. And flavor-wise, it all stands out more since the components are broken apart: you have lactic yogurt, herbal oil, vinegary pickle.

It’s kind of like the difference between listening to music in mono versus stereo. Breaking a sauce into components creates a more textured and layered effect for the eyes, for the mouth, and for the taste buds.

How to Sauce Smarter, Not Harder

Breaking apart a single sauce, though, is only one approach. There are others, and they can be even easier. One option, for example, is just to lean on what’s already in your fridge. Maybe you’ve got some jars just waiting for an excuse to be opened—chili crisp, chile sauces and pastes, mayonnaise, mustard, salsas, infused oils or miso or bottles of hot sauce. Any of those can be used straight from the jar, or tweaked just a tad (thinned with water or oil, if too thick and concentrated to use alone, for example), and you have a second sauce ready to go on top of whatever your main sauce is. Of course you have to use your judgement about which sauce combinations might work and which won’t, but that’s good practice anyway for developing your own cook’s intuition.

Many of these options don’t even need to be full-fledged sauces. A savory relish is a condiment more than a sauce, but stirred into a bit of mustard with some oil and dabbed or dolloped onto a plate of roast chicken with sauce soubise, and you’ve got yourself an extra “sauce” in an instant. Another example: The canederli recipe I published recently is delicious with either a brown butter sauce or the broth the bread dumplings are poached in, but it’s extra delicious with both. Is broth a sauce? Well, not exactly, but I think we can all agree it’s fulfilling a similar function of adding flavor and moisture to a dish.

Speaking of roast chicken, sometimes the second sauce is just a byproduct of cooking. I roast a whole chicken most weeks to feed my family, and it invariably produces delicious, chicken-fatty roasting juices. That’s a sauce. Add pommes purée thinned to a near-sauce-like consistency with cream and you have two sauces for the price of one. Or do the same with a vegetable puree.

The key to all of this is to realize that this style of restaurant cooking is within reach, it’s not necessarily extra work, and it can make your meals both more interesting and more varied. Just think about the weekly roast chicken and how much more enjoyable it’d be with chili crisp and a miso-mayo one week and a simple lemony vinaigrette and creamy tahini the next. Whether you’re feeding kids or just yourself, you’ll hear a lot less whinging—out loud or in your own head—about “chicken again?!”

4 Tips for Easy Multi-Sauce Success

1. Go for contrast. When thinking about which sauces to combine, try to prioritize contrast in texture, consistency, and flavor. Contrast is the name of the game—think creamy + acidic, smooth + chunky, rich + sharp. Your sauces should complement each other, but they should also stand apart.
2. Forget from-scratch. Sure, you can make one or more sauces from scratch, but you can just as easily reach into your fridge or pantry and use what’s in there. Most of us are sitting on gold mines of flavorful store-bought condiments and sauces that often go untouched for ages. Take advantage of what you’ve got and use up your ingredients before they hit their expiration date. That’s a win-win.
3. Think in terms of components. Maybe those components are store-bought items you already have on hand, or maybe they’re a single sauce recipe that you deconstruct into smaller units, such as in my tzatziki example above. The key is to not think in recipe terms, but in building-block terms. Your sauces and condiments are like Legos you can combine and recombine in different configurations. This also means you can make a component and apply it in different ways to the food you make throughout the week—so a parsley oil you whip up for pork on Monday can reappear with clams on Thursday. Your food will be more dynamic, and your prep will be easier too.
4. Look to different cuisines for inspiration. While chefs do multiple sauces a lot, they don’t own the concept—examples abound in traditional cuisines. Look no further than chaat and pani puri, tacos and chilaquiles, pho, fatta, and more for some ideas of how sauces can show up in multiples to make a dish more interesting.

Once you start doing this, it’ll be hard to stop. A yogurt sauce with harissa oil. A soy glaze with chili crisp and scallion relish. A vinaigrette with a smear of hummus. It’s not more work—it’s just more interesting.