How to measure sauce during reduction

If you’re in the habit of making saucy recipes, you’ve probably come across instructions to “reduce the liquid by half” or “simmer until the sauce is reduced by a third.”However The rate at which the sauce will decrease unless you regularly pour the sauce into the measuring cup Amount reduced It can be difficult to measure.Tilting the pan might get you an eyeball, but that’s still a guesstime. To more accurately measure the decreasing source, You will need wooden chopsticks.

Grab your chopsticks (the kind of wood that often comes with takeout) and dip them straight into the unreduced sauce. You want that stick to be perfectly vertical, touching the bottom of the pan. Pull back the chopsticks and mark with a pencil where your fingertips should be (this is why you need wooden chopsticks).

Continue to simmer the sauce, occasionally inserting chopsticks to see where the sauce hits against the original markings. If the recipe says to reduce by half, continue cooking until the liquid line is halfway between the tip of your chopstick and the pencil mark. If it says “reduce by 1/3”, heat up to 1/3 of the chopsticks. you get the idea.

This trick works best with just the right amount of sauce. If you’re reducing a small amount of pan sauce in a large sauté pan, the stick doesn’t have much depth to work with, but if you’re working with more than a half cup, it works like a dream in a small saucepan. If you want to get really technical, pre-marking the midpoints (or thirds) before simmering can take the guesswork out of it entirely. This may seem like overkill, but precision is the best friend of accurate and reproducible results.