Sauces

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This Foodie Friday the theme is sauces.  I was watching some golf highlights on TV and of course sauces came to mind immediately.  I know – my just having said the word makes you think that as well.  Or maybe not.  So let me explain and you might even see the business point that came to mind.

Let me say up front that what I’m about to say isn’t unique to golf highlights as you’ll see in a minute.  I’m watching the highlight and up from the lower portion of the screen comes a graphic describing what I’m seeing (no, the closed captioning wasn’t on..).  The graphic obscures a good 15% of the screen and all of the lower part.  The issue is that the hole was in the lower part and so the viewer never actually sees the highlight of the ball going in the hole (or maybe it nearly missed – who could tell).  What does this have to do with sauces?

Any Italian cook will tell you that the point of a pasta dish is the noodle.  The sauce is there as a condiment – the pasta is the star of the show and used with too heavy a hand, sauces obscure the pasta. In the case of TV, the graphics obscure the putt or focal point.  I’ve seen the same issue on non-sports channels (it’s bad on many news channels with a non-stop ticker) and having spent time in TV I can’t understand why the producer isn’t paying attention to what grpahics inserted over a finished show are doing to the viewer.

There is another thing bad cooks do:  using sauces to hide mistakes. You see this in barbecue all the time where folks still use BBQ sauce to hide the poor skill  that went into preparing the meat.  Sauce isn’t the point.

We sometimes forget this in business and get way too focused on the sauce.  It takes management skill to wipe away the sauce and check the quality of the noodle or meat underneath.  It’s not exactly a style vs. substance issue – many sauces are important piece that contribute to the succcess of the dish just as many ancillary issues are important in business.  But they can’t be the focus.  We also get too focused on side issues – promos, for example – and forget that the viewer is there for the program – the substance.

Do not over-sauce the pasta. Do not let side-issues obscure bad issues of substance underneath.  After all, you never hear someone say let’s go get some great sauerkraut, do you?