Question
Rose Tamberino
When creating cream sauces (vegan - nuts/flour to thicken, how do you keep it from drying out? I find that it is good when you initially make it and put it on the pasta, but once it sits & you eat it again as a left-over, it has gotten thick and gummy
Answer
Yes, that's actually very true. We will see that quite often, you know, even by the time we're actually serving a dish, sometimes it'll get a little dry or cracked out and it's kind of like, you know, white sauces even in, you know, vegetarian or full, you know, other recipes, you'll see that sometimes those have cracked and that kind of looks like what's happening. So the best way is, you know, serve it fresh. As soon as you make that sauce is try to be able to serve it as quickly as right after you've made it, which works really well. You can also, you know, keep the sauce in a container and I like to stir it up before serving it as well or heat it right beforehand as well. Now it sounds like your big question is when it's been out for a bit, right? So if you're making a pasta, so say you're making a bechamel of some sort, or you're making a vegan alfredo with the the cashews and your nutritional yeast and garlic, you know that will tend to look a little kind of grainy and cracked out afterward if you keep it in the fridge Now, there are a couple different ways to be able to reheat that. Like, what I'll typically do is put it into a pan, into a saute pan and just add a little bit of water to it, to be able to get that moisture back into it and then saute it. A lot of people I've heard use microwaves to do the same thing without adding the water though, because something in the me molecular process helps to be able to heat that back up in a way. I don't actually own a microwave so I can't tell that as much but I know in a saute pan, adding a little bit of water to that pasta before I re-cook it, is great. The other tip that I'd actually give you is not to sauce all of the pasta until you actually need it because leftover, it handles pretty darn well. And you know, if it does get thick or gummy, you can also put in just a little bit of water into that, into the saute pan. So typically that's what I'm going to do to be able to help those sauces that might dry out just a little bit because what they're doing is absorbing the water that's actually you're adding to those recipes too.
