Reducing a Sauce

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Reducing a Sauce


     Reducing a sauce is a good cooking skill to have that will come in handy in a variety of different recipes and making your own will help you stick to your budget.  Reducing a sauce intensifies the flavors of of a sauce and thicken it.  Thickening a sauce will help it stick to the food you are serving it on.  Picture it like this, if you put a nice thick spaghetti sauce on spaghetti it sticks to the noodles for a great dish, if you put tomato juice on spaghetti noodles you get bland noodles and a mess.  

     Reducing a sauce intensifies the flavors to make a great sauce, but can also be a little dangerous.  No, doing it wrong will not cause a zombie apocalypse but it could lead to a dish that you have to toss out and that's not good for your savings.  Be sure to avoid salt as much as possible until the very end, what may seem like a small amount of sauce in the beginning can be over powering in the end dish that is half the volume.  

     Now that we know why to reduce a sauce and what not to do, lets look at what you should do.  Many recipes will call for flour or corn starch as a thickening agent in a sauce, if I have it on hand I always use corn starch.  Corn starch give the sauce a silky mouth feel, but in terms of thickening the sauce either will work.  The most common way to use corn starch or flour to make a slurry is to add equal parts cold water and the starch or flour and mix well before adding to the dish, as the dish cooks this with thicken the sauce.  Another method I like (and the one I use in the saucy chicken stir fry) is to add the corn starch before adding the liquids that will make the sauce.  Adding the starch to the veggies and stirring it well distributes the corn starch throughout the dish so it cannot clump up.

     Once you remember all those little things it is really an easy process.  In a wide pan, I actually use a skillet most of the time when i reduce a sauce, bring the liquid to a boil.  When the liquid boils reduce the heat and simmer until the volume is about half of what you started with.  Salt to taste AFTER the sauce is fully reduced.  There are countless uses for this technique so try it out and enjoy.

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