When I think of cream sauces, I think of a giant bowl—one of those giant bowl-plate hybrids they have at restaurants—loaded with linguine and Alfredo sauce. And maybe some broccoli. Cream sauces can jazz up everything from pasta to meatballs, and while you can just pour hot cream over them and call it a day, the best sauces are thick. They coat each bite instead of pooling at the bottom of the plate. There’s a simple trick to making your cream sauces extra creamy: add acid.
How to Make a Basic White Sauce – Cream Sauce at its Simplest
Just as you can add vinegar or lemon juice to milk to thicken it as a substitute for buttermilk in baking, adding a dose of acid will thicken your cream sauce. The extra acid from the vinegar or lemon juice causes the proteins in the dairy to stick together and clump together. It’s the same reason lemon posset curdles in a pudding, even though it’s only three ingredients. If you add too much, this reaction can potentially look lumpy, but a little bit can give it extra body, which will appear “creamy” to your palate.
I first came across this idea on Milk Street . The author reduces cream for a pasta sauce to thicken it, then adds lemon juice to give it that extra kick. I wanted to see how much acid it would take to thicken the cream without it getting lumpy, and whether vinegar would work just as well. So I headed to the lab (ahem, kitchen) and tested the two with great success.
Heating the dairy will speed up the reaction, and since you’ll probably want to eat it hot anyway, start by adding the cream to a saucepan. Heat it over medium heat until it’s steaming and bubbling around the edges. You want to evaporate some of the water and reduce the cream, but don’t bring it to a boil or you’ll risk evaporating too much and ruining the cream.
