5 Ways to Beef Up Vegetarian Sauces

I am an unapologetic flexitarian—I eat meat, but I try to do it rarely and responsibly. I've already noted some tactics on how and why to eat less meat, but I also try to eat my fair share of purely vegetarian dishes. For the most part, I am a believer in the idea that vegetarian food can be every bit as delicious as meat-based cuisine, but I do think it takes a bit more thought.

WATCH VIDEO: Emeril's Vegetarian Delights for more Meat Free Flavor!

I'm a big fan of stew, for example. But one of the biggest challenges I find with vegetarian food is developing truly complex, flavorful sauces, gravies and stews. It's just hard to get a vegetable-based sauce to develop as rich and deep flavors as, say, a steak and ale pie, or a good gravy. But it is possible. Here are a few tips for rich, deep sauces with zero meat.

Keep reading to learn the Top 5 Tips for Flavorful Vegetarian Sauces, Gravies and Stews.

1. Caramelize:

An onion is an onion is an onion, right? Wrong. By cooking onions very long, and very slow, you can develop a rich, golden caramelization of their natural sugars. Then all you have to do is sprinkle on a little flour, let it brown, add your chosen liquid and the onions will impart their magic. (Think french onion soup, but without the beef broth.)

2. Add wine:

Seriously, if in doubt, add wine. For some reason, if a meat-based dish calls for X amount of wine, if I'm creating a vegetarian version, I'll double it. The beautiful, rich flavors of wine are like nothing else in the plant kingdom.

3. Use broth. Good broth:

Kelly has already covered the art of making vegetable broth, but if you don't have time for that, you should still invest in good quality stock cubes or buillon. (There's nothing worse than dry, crumbly, chalky, stock cubes.) Better Than Bouillon's range of sauce bases are my favorites, including a vegetable and a mushroom base, as well as vegetarian versions of chicken and beef-flavored bases.

4. Smoke it:

Smokey flavors should be used lightly, but when I'm creating a strong flavored dish like chilli, using either smoked sea salt or chipotle peppers can give that bacony flavor reminiscent of bonfires and cold nights.

5. Cream and Butter in Everything:

OK, this one won't work for the vegans, but when I asked my grandmother the secret to her incredible cooking, she laughed. "Cream and butter in everything" she cackled. And she might be right. I find that just a small amount of cream in a pasta sauce, for example, can bring a whole bunch of different flavors together, creating a unified whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

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