Cucumber Sauce with Garlic and Soured Milk

It has become a habit, even a stereotype, that a sauce is something you pour all over your food, or it is impossible to eat. Rarely does anyone think of a sauce as more than mayonnaise from the nearest supermarket or ketchup from a sachet. One acquaintance of mine even claimed that the height of sauce-making was ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard in equal parts, until he tried cucumber sauce with garlic and soured milk.

Actually, a sauce or gravy is a fairly thick seasoning served with dishes, usually main courses. Its job is to make a dish juicier and richer and often more nourishing. Indirectly, a sauce also improves how the dish looks. A sauce is often not only served with the main dish but also used to cook it. On the Pacific islands, dishes of meat and vegetables stewed in coconut milk are very popular, and the coconut milk then serves as the sauce.

The thickness of a sauce varies a lot depending on the dish, and the same sauce can be very thin or very thick. The liquid base ranges from plain water to very complex or exotic mixtures. The so-called “additional part” is chopped ingredients (meat, fish, cheese, vegetables, mushrooms and so on), spices, herbs and other additions. Quite often sauces are also thickened with flour or starch.

Cucumber sauce appears in French cuisine, which recognizes several types of “mother” sauces. They are served on their own or used as a base for more complex “derivative sauces”.

Dressings, or salad dressings, are a category of their own. Perhaps the best-known one is vinaigrette, a mix of olive oil and wine vinegar. In practice, ordinary vegetable oil is often used to dress a salad. Another well-known dressing is sour cream, or thick fermented dairy products. And nothing stops you from adding other ingredients to a dressing: lemon or orange juice, herbs, grated cheese.

The Eastern cucumber sauce is tzatziki (also spelled dzadziki, jajik, tsatsiki, and with many other pronunciations). It is considered a Greek sauce. I will not argue; maybe so. But I have tried versions of it in many countries of the East, the Balkans and the Mediterranean, and everywhere the locals are convinced that their people invented it. Greek tzatziki is more of an appetizer than a sauce, though its consistency can be anything. In Bulgaria, the cold soured-milk soup tarator is practically the same recipe as tzatziki. It differs from the kvass okroshkathat we love. In the summer heat on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, I personally love a bowl of ice-cold tarator. A thicker version, practically an appetizer with the same ingredients as tzatziki, is very common in Turkey: cacik. In Bulgaria too, the “milk salad” is very popular. It is as thick as pâté and made from soured milk.

Today we will make cucumber sauce with garlic, based on homemade soured milk, using most of the ingredients typical of tzatziki.