has its uses.
Many sauces can be thickened not just by
adding thickeners, but by removing some of
the continuous phase — boiling off water —
so that the thickeners already present in the
sauce become more concentrated. This
technique doesn’t diminish flavor, because
whatever flavor the sauce’s particles and
molecules can bind have already been bound.
And in fact it can intensify flavor, because the
concentration of flavor molecules may
increase just as the thickeners’ concentration
does.
The Importance of Salt Recent research has
uncovered intriguing indications that
thickeners reduce our perception of aroma in
part because they reduce our perception of
saltiness. Various long-chain carbohydrates,
including starch, first reduce the apparent
saltiness of the sauce, either by binding
sodium ions to themselves or by adding