The Smartest Way to Measure Your Sauce While It Boils
If you’re in the habit of making savory recipes, you’ve probably come across instructions that tell you to “reduce the amount of liquid by half” or “simmer until the sauce is reduced by one third.” But unless you are pouring your sauce into the measuring cup at regular intervals, the rate at which your sauce is decreasing and the amount by which it has decreased can be difficult to estimate. The tilt of the pan might help you see it by eye, but that’s still speculation. To accurately measure the sauce as it cooks, you will need a wooden chopstick.
Just take a chopstick – the wooden one that often comes with takeaways – and dip it straight into the undiluted sauce. You want this stick to be completely vertical and you want it to touch the bottom of the pan. Mark the depth with your fingers by placing the tips directly on the surface of the sauce. Pull the chopstick back out, then mark your fingertips with a pencil (which is why you need a wooden chopstick).
Continue to simmer the sauce over low heat, inserting your chopstick from time to time to see where the sauce hits it in relation to your original mark. If your recipe says to cut the volume in half, continue cooking until the line of liquid is halfway between the tip of the chopstick and the pencil mark. If it says “reduce by a third”, then cook until it is 1/3 the length of the chopstick. You get the idea.
This trick works best with a decent amount of sauce. If you dilute a small amount of sauce in a large skillet, your chopstick won’t have much depth to work with, but it works like a dream if you’re working with something over half a cup in one comb. small saucepan. If you want really technical information, you can pre-mark the middle (or a third of the way) before you start boiling, just to take the guess work out of it. It may seem like overkill, but accuracy is the best friend of accurate, reproducible results.