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You seem to have the wrong expectations. No, it will never be as thickening as a cornstarch slurry. If that's the level of thickening you expect, you are really better off using the slurry.
Don't forget that pasta water thickening is a traditional technique from the time when people did not go to the supermarket to buy a pack of cornstarch. They cooked down ...
20
There are lots of potential thickeners, but you often need to select the one that works best with your given need (temperature, if it has dairy, resulting mouthfeel, etc).
In your case, you're already using rice, so you may want to stick with a starch -- corn starch, potato starch, tapioca, etc. For these, you add a bit to cold liquid, mix it well, add it ...
17
Another thickener that is readily available is gelatin. This has the added advantage that its free of carbohydrate (if you are avoiding that).
17
Think of your pasta water as a tool for emulsification, rather than "thickening." Adding pasta water to your condiment pan has the benefit of helping the condiment form an emulsified sauce that adheres to your pasta. Add it a little at a time and swirl the pan vigorously. It also allows you to control how "wet" you want your final result to be without ...
15
Consider the use of gums, which are essentially thickening agents.
Xanthan gum, a bacterial byproduct, can be used to thicken sauces. Here is an example of using xanthan + [pectin] (a plant sugar gelling agent) to thicken a vegan demi-glace.
A traditional demi-glace has gelatin from the breakdown of collagen (from animal bones), which is how it achieves a ...
13
Tapioca Starch
- Add at the very end of cooking, it works quickly and has a pretty neutral flavour. You don't it to spend much/any time over heat. If you can't find it in your typical grocery store, you should be able to find in a typical Asian grocery store/aisle. I use this often when I have Celiac friends over.
Arrrowroot powder
- More stable than other ...
13
A reaction that prevents starch from the same plant thickening if you add it later instead of all at the same time seems very unlikely. And anyway, a roux could be made with non-wheat flour even though it's not traditional - what do they think would happen then? Or if you make a roux on another pan and add that. I can confirm that works.
There is a good ...
11
Fresh tomatoes are insanely watery, so you're starting at a pretty big disadvantage here. Trying to fix it with a thickening agent alone might not be the best plan.
That said, if you want a short answer: use tomato paste, whether homemade or storebought. It'll thicken and improve the flavor. Watery tomato sauce usually has watery flavor, not just watery ...
10
While sugar makes a liquid thicker, it is not considered a thickening agent.
Sugar is a crystal. When you add it to water, what you get is a simple solution. A solution of a solid in water is always thicker than water. This happens with all kinds of everyday substances. Whenever you add a thick liquid or a solid to a thin liquid, the result is a semi-thick ...
10
As moscafj said, pasta water cannot be understood as a thickening agent at all. In fact, I understand it as a thinning agent: after your sauce has boiled down to more of a paste (great taste, but not very immersive to the pasta), you'll need some way to make it proper liquid again. What you do not want at that point is to make it runny, watery, hence adding ...
10
A very small amount of xanthan gum will work. It is commonly used in salad dressings. Be careful though, too much will result in an unpleasant texture that some describe as mucus-like. Maybe start with 1/4 tsp. Wisk in and increase from there as necessary, but in very small amounts. Xanthan takes a while to hydrate and thicken. Start with a small amount,...
10
The best way to decide whether to reduce a sauce or to add a thickening agent is to taste it. If the flavour is as strong as you want it to be, then reduce it no further and add something to thicken it.
If the flavour is too weak, keep reducing it.
Other points to consider/caveats:
reducing will increase salt concentration, so even if the flavour is too ...
8
If the restaurant or bar is using a margarita mix, they frequently contain additional syrups and stabilizing gums or starches which add body to the drinks. It could also be that the high powered blenders frequently used in bars will be better at creating a smoother and thicker texture, or a more 'emulsified' slush.
If you want to try making it thicker at ...
8
If you are looking for the basic and common ingredient to thicken the soup then I would suggest to go with Corn flour.
All you need to do is mix corn flour in cold water. Add it into soup and stir it well. And you are done.
7
Several options, depending on the type of curry and the ingredients already present.
Japanese Style Curries
Using a commercial, packaged Japanese-style roux:
Add another brick or two from the package. This type dissolves nicely generally with minimal clumping.
Using a homemade, Japanese style roux:
You can prepare additional roux by melting fat (butter, beef ...
7
The closest thing you are likely to find is a product called Wondra flour. Like idealmjöl, it is a pre-gelated wheat flour, but unlike idealmjöl it also includes some malted barley flour.
One post on this forum implies they may be interchangeable.
7
You can use cooked dry beans. I use baby Lima's, canned or freshly cooked. Do not rinse away the starch after you cook them. Cream them in a blender or food processor, place them in a skillet and add some of the drippings until it reaches the consistency you like then season, simmer and strain.
6
The thickening in Bearnaise, as in mayonnaise, is not so much in the ingredients as in the technique. These sauces get their thickness by being emulsified.
An emulsion is formed by rapidly mixing, whisking or blending two ingredients that shouldn't mix (oil and liquid). The emulsifier (egg yolk and often mustard in the case of mayo) stabilizes the emulsion (...
6
You can visualise it like this: starch is the way that plants store energy, you can see it like long chains of glucose molecules. If you have these long chains, they lock in water at high temps (gelatinisation), and so they bind sauces. If you burn them, what you do is break those chains into glucose (or maltose), and that glucose you caramelise..that is ...
6
Corn starch is a thickener, but not right out of the box. It needs to be heated to gelatinize, which also gets rid of the chalky taste.
If you tried to cook your random sauce now, you'd get a very thick mass that could easily be a prop in a bad sci-fi or horror movie, but not a dipping sauce. And the sheer amount of starch would "absorb and eliminate" most ...
6
Using roux - flavoured with curry powder and aromatics - is a well known, often used technique for japanese and chinese style curries. Your mileage may vary with beurre manie (known to be finicky), if results are not satisfactory try cooking the powder/aromatics in oil/butter and only then adding flour and whisking (classic roux technique).
Mind that indian ...
6
Try sugar.
Per Heinz' website, the ingredients in their ketchup are:
TOMATO CONCENTRATE FROM RED RIPE TOMATOES, DISTILLED VINEGAR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CORN SYRUP, SALT, SPICE, ONION POWDER, NATURAL FLAVORING
I notice that they do not include xanthan gum at all, but they do include sugar in the form of various corn syrups. Cooking plain sugar ...
6
The egg yolks can thicken the liquid when you heat it, like in a standard egg custard (the home made version, not the one made from custard powder). But this is a fairly tricky procedure: if you heat it too much the mixture will separate. So best done on a double boiler ('bain marie').
And in addition, you have the whipped cream and the gelatine, which will ...
6
You are on the right track. Reducing is when you let the cooking liquids gently evaporate until the resulting sauce is concentrated to your desired taste and consistency.
Thickening is when some type of starch such as flour, cornstarch, arrowroot, etc. is used to actually thicken the cooking liquids. This is how you would make a traditional gravy or thicken ...
5
Once this has happened, about the only practical way to remove them is with a strainer. Of course that will remove anything else in the sauce like onions as well.
In the future, you can use better ways to thicken your sauce. See some ideas in this question, which while phrased for mushroom sauce, has a very general answer: How can I thicken my mushroom ...
5
Sliding well has nothing to do with weight or thickness, although too thin makes the dough prone to tearing. A generous spread of ground semolina under the pizza dough after shaping will keep it from sticking to your counter while you top it, and in your oven when you bake it. The grainy semolina will act as a barrier, keeping the bottom of your dough off ...
5
As Max points out, emulsifiers work by allowing two normally incompatible ingredients to mix. There are different ways that emulsifiers do this. Lecithin, probably the most common emulsifier, can do this because its molecule has a water-binding end and an oil-binding end. Hydrocolloids, like xanthan gum, can also have emulsification properties, but they work ...
5
Cascabel has already given a thorough answer, but I'd like to offer some advice about reducing the sauce.
Any time you are trying to get rid of liquid, you want as much surface area as possible. As suggested in Cascabel's answer, you can reduce the tomatoes in the oven on shallow baking trays (and if you're doing a larger quantity this is definitely the ...
5
If you are making a tortilla filler then you probably don't want that much sauce in the end product, so rather than thickening it you might want to consider reducing the amount of liquid that goes into it in the first place. Peppers and onions both shed water as they are cooked, and canned tomatoes have water as well. You don't want to lose your peppers, so ...
5
Take one or two scoops of your soup (prefer the solid parts), put it into a blender, blitz until smooth and put it back into your soup.
You'll get zero additional calories and zero awful stuff your grandma wouldn't identify as food.
This obviously only works if we're not talking about a broth.
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