A coulis ( ) is a form of thin

sauce In cooking, a sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi- solid food, served on or used in preparing other foods. Most sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavour, texture, and visual appeal to a dish. ''Sauce'' is a French wor ...

made from puréed and strained

vegetable Vegetables are edible parts of plants that are consumed by humans or other animals as food. This original meaning is still commonly used, and is applied to plants collectively to refer to all edible plant matter, including edible flower, flo ...

s or

fruit In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants (angiosperms) that is formed from the ovary after flowering. Fruits are the means by which angiosperms disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits in particular have long propaga ...

s. A vegetable coulis is commonly used on meat and vegetable dishes, and it can also be used as a base for

soup Soup is a primarily liquid food, generally served warm or hot – though it is sometimes served chilled – made by cooking or otherwise combining meat or vegetables with Stock (food), stock, milk, or water. According to ''The Oxford Compan ...

s or other sauces. Fruit coulis are most often used on desserts.

Raspberry The raspberry is the edible fruit of several plant species in the genus ''Rubus'' of the Rosaceae, rose family, most of which are in the subgenus ''Rubus#Modern classification, Idaeobatus''. The name also applies to these plants themselves. Ras ...

coulis, for example, is especially popular with poached

apples An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

or Key lime pie. Tomato coulis may be used to add flavor to other sauces or served on its own (either cold or hot). The term comes from

Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th [2-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ...

''coleïs'', meaning flowing or running. The way of making coulis varies with the type of fruit or vegetable used: it is possible to simply mash raspberries and strawberries through a strainer with a spoon, while ripe pears and melons are usually pureed in a blender prior to straining; apples have to be cooked first. Depending on the consistency of the puree, either a chinois (for the softest purees),

food mill A food mill (also called passatutto, purée sieve, moulinette, mouli légumes, passe-vite, or triturator) is a food preparation utensil for wikt:Mash, mashing and sieve, sieving soft foods invented in Brussels in 1928 by Victor Simon. Typicall ...

, or drum sieve (for the hardest ones) can be used for straining. Reduction of coulis (to strengthen its sweetness and flavor) can be difficult, as the sauce may acquire a jam-like taste when heated, so sometimes vacuum evaporation is used to boil the mixture at a lower temperature.

Additives

While fruit coulis can be used with its natural flavor, a small amount of fruit brandy ( Kirsch, framboise, ) is occasionally added when under-ripe fruits are used. Desserts that are not very sweet, like

brioche Brioche (, also , , ) is a bread of French origin whose high egg and butter content gives it a rich and tender crumb. Chef Joël Robuchon described it as "light and slightly puffy, more or less fine, according to the proportion of butter and e ...

, can benefit from coulis with added sugar, while the taste of ice cream, on the other hand, improves with a contrasting, unsweetened sauce.

Older uses

In its current meaning, the term is fairly new in the English language, with widespread use, alongside Nouvelle cuisine, since the 1980s (

Merriam-Webster Dictionary ''Webster's Dictionary'' is any of the US English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by Noah Webster (1758–1843), a US lexicographer, as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster's n ...

provides 1952 as the first recorded use in the modern sense). However, originally with the spelling ''cullis'', the word has six hundred years of history in the English language. The ''cullis'' was derived from an

''coleis'' (originally from , "to strain"), the French word defining straining, pouring, flowing, or sliding (the meaning is preserved in English "colander"). The term was used to denote strained broth, originally likely made from chicken, later also from meat and fish. The cullis was used as a sauce or as a base for other sauces.

References

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* * Sauces {{condiment-stub

Additives

Older uses

See also

References

Sources