How can I make this wine and bacon sauce into a thick liquid?

How can I make this wine and bacon sauce into a thick liquid? - Tablecloth on table with delicious plate with small roasted bird covered in bacon with sauce near glasses with wine and water near forks and knife in light restaurant near chair

I followed this recipe for a red wine and bacon steak sauce.

The sauce didn't thicken at all, the result was mostly boiled in red wine bacon, which wasn't bad, but wouldn't spread on my steak at all. How can I make this into a thicker sauce? I figure that I can add some cornstarch but is there another method?



Best Answer

It sounds like you cooked it too long, and additionally, the recipe may just be bad. If you managed to cook away all the liquid and end up with just wine-infused bacon, there was probably a point before then with a reasonable amount of liquid. Sometimes what people are going for with wine reduction sauces is really to have a lot of the wine flavor concentrated into some minced ingredients, with enough thickened liquid to hold it together a bit. If you crumble the bacon finely enough, and don't reduce away all the liquid, you might find you like it like that.

But it sounds like you're looking for more of a liquid sauce, and at the point when enough liquid remained, it was too thin. I'd might suggest just finding a more detailed, trustworthy recipe for a wine reduction sauce, and just adding in bacon (and maybe taking out some other ingredients).

Short of that, if I were going to try to do this without many extra ingredients, I'd:

  • Save the fat that cooks out of the bacon.
  • Crumble the bacon very finely.
  • Keep plenty of liquid when reducing.
  • Whisk together equal parts bacon fat and flour and cook until the flour turns a bit golden. (Basically, make roux with bacon fat.)
  • Whisk the sauce into the roux and cook for a bit longer.

This is again a very fuzzy recipe. With the amount of fat bacon releases, you can definitly make more than enough roux to thicken plenty of sauce - depending on how much you reduce the wine and how thick you want the sauce, I'm guessing you'd only need a tablespoon or two of roux. If you feel you've lost too much of the bacon flavor, see SAJ14SAJ's answer for how to incorporate more of the fat without the sauce separating.

(In general, you have to be careful with vague recipes like the one you found - they'll tend to assume you know some things, so if you can't fill in the gaps yourself, it may be best to find a more specific one! And sometimes they're just bad recipes. That one tells you to fry bacon in olive oil, which is really suspicious - you don't need extra oil to fry bacon.)




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How do you make wine sauce thicker?

Instructions:
  • Combine equal parts cornstarch and cold water. Stir together until smooth.
  • Pour into your sauce and cook over medium heat, stirring continually, until the sauce reaches your desired consistency.
  • Test the sauce with a spoon.


  • How do I make my sauce thick and gooey?

    Cornstarch or arrowroot You'll need about 1 tablespoon for every cup of liquid in the recipe. Mix the cornstarch with equal parts water to create a slurry and pour it into the pot. Whisk continuously over high heat until the cornstarch is well incorporated and the sauce starts to thicken.

    How do you thicken a butter and white wine sauce?

    Add flour: like a quick roux! It's like a quick version of a roux, a way to thicken creamy sauces like in our Easy Cream Sauce. Simmer with the wine and cream for 3 minutes. Add the Parmesan cheese and whisk the sauce until it melts.



    Turn any Liquid into Homemade Gravy with this Secret




    More answers regarding how can I make this wine and bacon sauce into a thick liquid?

    Answer 2

    In addition to Jefromi's comments, I believe that this is not a quality recipe you are following. It is more of an outline of a technique, which is simply a very strong reduction of wine with bacon and bacon fat.

    Reducing the wine sufficiently will make it essentially thick and syrupy, but will not help it emulsify with the bacon fat.

    If you wish to use this technique, you might find that finishing it by whisking in some cold butter will help create an emulsion and thicken the sauce. This is the technique the French call beurre monté.

    Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

    Images: Maria Bortolotto, Julia Filirovska, Rachel Claire, Edward Eyer