Tartar Sauce Is The Unexpected Condiment Your Steak Needs

When a steak comes sizzling off the grill and onto the plate, many will instinctively reach for a bottle of steak sauce to augment the rich, meaty flavor. But over time, conventional toppings can become played out. If you crave a more creative dressing for your steak, there are 17 sauces you can try to boost the meal. These can include the herbal, citrusy chimichurri, a delicious red wine reduction sauce with butter and rosemary, and even tartar sauce.

As many people know it, tartar sauce is recognized for its abilities to complement seafood. But it can also be an excellent complement for a fresh grilled ribeye or flank steak. Because it's both creamy and herbal, it can naturally support the rich flavors of beef, while enveloping each bite in a smooth, velvety mouthfeel. For added ease and convenience, you can try creating your own tartar sauce with just three ingredients and discover a totally new way to eat steak.

Even with just three ingredients — typically mayonnaise, pickle relish, and lemon juice — tartar sauce will always be some sort of creamy, herbal, and tangy combination. And just as a Steak Diane sauce adds a rich, creamy texture to any steak, the mayonnaise in tartar sauce will help create a buttery, melt-in-your-mouth consistency. The strong acidity in lemon juice will also give the sauce its characteristic tang, just like how other marinades and sauces count on lemon or other citrus fruits to help bolster meat's flavors.

Lemon juice in particular makes steak scientifically more delicious by increasing salivation and helping to tenderize the meat before it cooks. Salivation works to both dissolve food in the mouth as it's chewed, and bring flavor to the taste buds. At the same time, acidity can help break down the collagen in steak, loosening its muscle fibers and creating a more tender cut.

Meanwhile, herbs such as rosemary, thyme, and parsley can add fresh, clean notes to the otherwise heavy or fatty flavors of beef. Rosemary is especially ubiquitous in beef stews and roasts, and is often used with butter and garlic in exquisite recipes like this rosemary-rubbed ribeye steak. Tartar sauce gets its herbal notes from pickle relish or herbs such as dill or tarragon, meaning it checks both of these boxes for enhancing flavor.

The same qualities that make tartar sauce excellent on steak would also work well on a burger — perhaps a mushroom Swiss burger. Tartar sauce can add the right amount of acidity and herbal notes to complement the sweetness of caramelized mushrooms, while creating a sumptuous topping for a juicy ground beef patty that's cooked to perfection.

The creamy, herbal sauce could also excel as a dip for crispy fried chicken tenders, providing an outstanding creamy foil for the chicken's crunch. Along the same lines, you can try one or more of these 16 tricks to make potatoes extra crispy and pair them with tartar sauce to round out the savory starch. 

Mayo itself can be used as an on-the-grill marinade, becoming a secret ingredient for moist tuna steak, with tartar sauce as a reliable option to serve on the side. Truly, almost any protein could serve as a noble carrier for this excellent but often overlooked sauce.