How To Thicken Up Your Sauces
Culinary creations and sauces alike all started in France. Today we see different varieties of these thickeners and they’re still being used for thickening up all kinds of wonderful sauces unless of course if the sauces are going to be used not as a sauce but as a “jus”.
As a matter of fact, a very major differences among sauces and jus are the following, sauces refers to any liquid topping or dressing while jus means that juices coming from any of your delicious roasted meats which would then be turned into a thickener for sauces.
Typically whichever kind of thickeners you’d be using will depend on the kind of texture and taste that your sauce recipe will require.
The ultimate and most famous agent for thickening would be the “roux” – roux is one of those typical and classical thickeners that are used in either brown, blond or white sauces. A roux in actuality is just your typically and regularly cooked mix of fat and flour, the fat used at times is clarified butter. A roux is typically used in order to thicken up sauces or soups .
The roux’s color would indicate its intensity and its flavor like when creating a b�chamel sauce, this may be achieved by mixing a not so-cooked white type of roux together with just a touch or hint of nutmeg, while a veloute sauce may be created by using the chicken stock plus that blond type of roux which has that nutty aroma. Gumbo is also a great sauce that’s created with a well cooked and very nutty brown type of roux.
If you’re not able to make and use a roux then you can substitute it with that water and cornstarch mixture which is referred to as the “slurry”. The slurry is normally added to sauces while they’re still cooking.
Still yet another substitute for a roux is what the french call a “beurre manie”. The beurre manie is a kind of mixture that incorporates softened butter and flour but this thickener isn’t to be used like a roux but it should be added during the cooking process.
2 other methods in thickening sauces would be to use a liaison or just doing a very simple reducing procedure. The liaison is this thickener that’s a mix of eggs and cream which then can be used in thickening that sauce or soup. A reduction on the other hand doesn’t require any ingredients but just that sauces are just left alone to reduce and thicken after some time because water in them will have reduced after some time.
There’s a lot of ways to get your sauces thick, you just need to be creative and let your imagination run free and experiment on the different kinds of sauces