Chemistry Bites: Hittin’ the Sauce

Episode 3 is here, folks, and in it, we’re hittin’ the sauce! Kind of. We’re actually reworking pesto and tomato-carrot sauce to make them taste just as good with a more beneficial nutritional profile. I don’t believe in making things healthier if they don’t taste as good — these taste just as good as their originals, and they’re better for you, too! Let’s hit our healthy pesto and tomato sauce!

Tomato-Basil Pesto

Ask my girlfriend, I adore pesto! But with a full half cup of oil in a standard recipe, it’s not only pricey, but also chock full of calories. The swap here is simple — add tomatoes for volume and puree them, toss in some red wine vinegar for additional taste and then we drizzle the olive oil on just before using.

Nutrition out of the way, one of the most important considerations in making a sauce is the texture. Where traditional pesto gets its texture from the copious amounts of olive oil, this pesto gets the saucy texture from the tomatoes. Aside from just providing volume, the pectin the tomatoes thickens the basil/tomato mixture and preserves the saucy texture. The pectin molecules link up with themselves and maintain everything nice and saucy.

Carrot-Tomato Sauce

Common cream-based tomato sauce relies solely on the cream to create the right taste and creamy thickness. This one is thickened not with cream, but carrots and potatoes. The carrots add tons of sweetness and sugar, and the potatoes create the proper texture. Just a hair of cream is added in at the end to finish things off. It’s the starch that mainly thickens this one, though the pectin from the tomatoes obviously plays a role. Starch plus heat = thickener, since the starch molecules swell and absorb the water and coats other water molecules to create a gel.