I'm teaching myself to cook and I just tried to make a pan sauce to go with my turkey breast. This failed pretty much completely and I decided to abandon the sauce and eat the turkey breast without it.
I used a stainless steel pan, added some canola oil and put the turkey breast in until it was brownish on both sides. I removed the turkey breast and added a 1:1 mixture of white wine and water (I don't have any stock). I did want to put some minced onions in there, but I forgot to put them in before the wine.
I did abort the sauce at that point, I had planned to add some butter, some dried herbs and maybe some mustard.
Even after reducing the sauce a lot it didn't really thicken. The taste was also pretty off, the wine was far too strong and it tasted a bit too oily for me.
I assume that the oily taste is because I didn't spoon off any oil before adding the wine, I though it wasn't too much but obviously I misjudged. But I don't know why it didn't thicken and how I can fix that. Some recipes add thickening agents, but many I found do not, so I assumed this would work. I'm also not sure how to avoid the wine to taste too strong except for using less in the mixture.
Any ideas on what went wrong and how I can do it better the next time?