Used to taste every sauce 5 times before service, now I just check it once and trust the recipe card

Dakota Rivera · 2026-09-14T11:40:03.384563+00:00

For my first three years on the line at a spot in Denver I would taste every single sauce like six or seven times before we opened. I was so scared of sending out something bad that I would stand there with a spoon, taste, add a pinch of salt, taste again, add a little acid, taste again. It got to the point where I was burning through like 20 minutes just on the hollandaise alone, and my chef at the time finally pulled me aside and said 'you're not tasting anymore, you're just worrying with a spoon in your hand.' That stuck with me. Now I taste once, maybe twice if it's a batch I haven't made in a while, and I write it down on the recipe card so the next person on that station knows what it should taste like. The weird part is my sauces got better because I stopped messing with them so much, and service runs way smoother. Anyone else go through a phase where over tasting actually made things worse?

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Used to taste every sauce 5 times before service, now I just check it once and trust the recipe card | Chefs - HW Forums