Easiest Ways to Thicken Liquid Sauce
Sauce from a piece of meat only for it to drip and accumulate on the plate, heartbreaking. A good sauce is a vehicle for contrasting and complementary flavors, but it won’t do you any good if it can’t stick to the food it’s supposed to be sauce for.
An effective sauce is one that stays on the food, adding flavor and wrapping around the mouth. It takes a bit of chemical manipulation to make this sauce, but the chemicals you need are likely already in your closet.
What is sauce?
Sauces are dispersions with aromatic ingredients suspended in a carrier ingredient. The carrier is called the “continuous phase” and is almost always water. The other ingredients are part of the dispersed phase and are, you guessed it, dispersed throughout the continuous phase.
Water is definitely an important ingredient in sauces, but no one needs a watery sauce. The purpose of making a sauce is to make the water less watery, and the best way to do this is to prevent it from moving. As Harold McGee explains in his book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Knowledge of the Kitchen , water is a tiny molecule that makes it very mobile:
Individual water molecules are small – just three atoms, H₂O. Left to themselves, they are very mobile: therefore the water is liquid and flows easily, like a stream. (Oil molecules, on the other hand, are made up of three strands of 14–20 atoms stuck together, so they pull toward each other and move more slowly. This is why oil is more viscous than water.) But inclusions of solid particles, or long, tangled molecules, or drops of oil, or air bubbles among water molecules, and water molecules can only travel a short distance before colliding with one of these foreign, less mobile substances. Then they can move very slowly, so they flow more reluctantly.
To put it simply: in order for your sauce to stick to your food, you have to slow it down.
Slow down your sauce with fat
Buffalo Sauce is an iconic two-ingredient sauce that sticks to chicken wings without issue. It is most often cooked with hot sauce (which is quite watery) and butter. Butter is not only a fat (a long tangled molecule) but also a solid fat at room temperature. As the chicken and sauce cool, the sauce will slow down even more, sticking to the chicken and coating its skin. Butter (or high-fat cream) also makes pan sauces so juicy, allowing them to stick to a steak or chop. The next time you run into a runny sauce in a pan, add a dollop of butter, a dash of heavy cream, or a dollop of sour cream to slow it down and give it a bit of thickness.
Load up on cornstarch
Starch is another effective thickener that slows down water by swelling and gelling. When exposed to hot water , the starch granules weaken and begin to absorb liquid. The granules swell, weakening even more areas of the granule and destroying the organized structures of the starch molecules. According to McGee, this creates “amorphous networks of mixed starch and water” that slow down the cooking of the sauce, helping it to coat your food.
If you are dealing with a sautéed sauce or a gravy that is too thin, slurry the cornstarch with two parts water and one part starch (adding it directly to the sauce will cause it to clump), then whisk it into your hot sauce, keeping in mind that your sauce will thicken even more as it cools. (If you want to see how thick it thickens without letting the whole pot of sauce cool, drizzle it onto a cool plate .)
If you don’t have corn starch, you can also use flour and make beurre manie, which is French for “flour butter paste” or “raw dressing “. To make this little ball of thickening magic, simply take equal masses of flour and butter and mash it all into a small ball of paste. To thicken a sauce (or soup, or whatever), break off a small piece and simply toss it into the hot liquid. Stir, stir, stir and watch the magic happen.
Puree some vegetables
One of the easiest ways to slow down the movement of water is to physically block it with plant matter. You can toss the super-roasted veggies right into the sauce, or stir them in with the liqueur from your favorite Instant Pot recipe. Vegetables that are high in starch (eg potatoes) or pectin (eg pods) also thicken chemically. Adding a couple of scoops of instant mashed potatoes can help make the sauce stickier, while mashed leeks can make it richer.
Boil a little
Another way to reduce the fluidity of a sauce is to physically remove the water by boiling it. In the culinary world, this is called “reduction” because you reduce the volume of the sauce by evaporating some of the water, leaving the fat and other tasty ingredients (with a higher boiling point). If your sauce looks runny before it hits your food, boil it for a bit to thicken it up.
Add some sugar
Sugar doesn’t thicken in the same way that starch or fat does, but it does make your sauce stickier, and the whole point is to make your sauce stick to your food. Adding sugar to water creates a solution that is thicker than water, and further heating (boiling or boiling) makes it even thicker.
Apply at the right time
You may have noticed that in many meat in sauce recipes, the sauce is applied later in the cooking process, after the meat has been grilled or in the oven for a while. Again, it all boils down to water.
Cooking a piece of meat causes a lot of moisture to be released from it. If you apply your sauce at the start, it will evaporate right off your food, so brush on your deliciously thick and reduced glazes and sauces at the end when the outside of your food looks rather dry and/or crispy to prevent a terrible sauce. Roll down.