The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Technique

Reducing a sauce

95 dishes across 67 chapters · 0 marked cooked

On the Path of Study: Semester 1: Knife & Fire Foundations, Semester 4: The Braise, Semester 10: The Restaurateur's Capstone

From the Lexicon, Reduction, Nappe & Mounting

REDUCTION: simmering a liquid to evaporate water, concentrating flavor and body, the sauce-maker's primary move, always reduced BEFORE final seasoning (salt concentrates too). NAPPE: the classical doneness test: sauce coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line drawn by a finger. MONTER AU BEURRE: 'mounting' cold butter cubes into a finished sauce off the heat, swirling, emulsifying in gloss, body, and richness; the last thirty seconds that make restaurant sauces taste like restaurant sauces. Together they are the grammar of à-la-minute saucing: reduce, season, mount, plate.

Read it in the Lexicon →

How to tell it is going right

  • A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
  • Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
  • The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
  • Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
  • Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.

Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.

This technique, on camera Search films of reducing a sauce

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