When I think of creamy sauce, I think of a giant bowl – there is a giant bowl and plate mix in restaurants – which is piled high with linguine and Alfredo sauce. Maybe some broccoli. Creamy sauces can garnish anything from pasta to meatballs, and while you can simply pour hot cream on top and leave it at that, the best sauces are thick. They embrace every bite of food instead of forming a pool of water at the bottom of the plate. There's a simple trick to make your creamy sauce even creamier: add acid.
Just like adding vinegar or lemon juice to milk to thicken it to use as a buttermilk substitute in baking, mixing a certain amount of acid thickens the cream sauce. The extra acid in vinegar or lemon juice can cause the proteins in dairy products to stick and coagulate together. This is the same reason as putting lemon jelly in a pudding, even though it only has three ingredients. If you add too much, this reaction may look heavy, but just adding a little bit can give it an extra mellow feel that will look like "creamy" on your taste buds.
I first stumbled upon the idea on Milk Street. The author reduced the amount of cream in the pasta sauce to thicken it, then added lemon juice to add its extra push. I wanted to see how much acid it would take to thicken the cream without thickening it, and if vinegar would do the same. So, I went to the lab (ahem, kitchen) and tested both with great success.
Heating dairy will speed up the reaction, and since you may want hot food, add the cream to the pan or pan first. Heat it over medium-low heat until hot and bubbly around the edges. You want to evaporate some water and reduce the amount of cream, but don't boil it because this may evaporate too much and spoil the cream.
To make a serving of pasta sauce, I add half a cup of cream to the pan and simmer for about five minutes while stirring. Then I turned off the heat. In the first test, I added two teaspoons of vinegar and stirred. The cream becomes visibly thick and creamy. Although it doesn't crack, when it cools, the texture becomes chunky. As you can see in **, regular cream has a thinner covering on the walls of the bowl, while the addition of vinegar makes the cream build up in the center. The spoon shows that the cream sauce is becoming clumpy.
I also did the same thing, added lemon juice and got similar results. Two teaspoons of acid seemed like too much, so I reduced the acidity of half a cup of cream to one teaspoon. This is the sweetest place. The cream sauce is still flowing, but has become more viscous and does not border the yogurt. Especially if you add cheese (which I ended up doing), you just need to add a small amount of acid. Whatever you have on hand, you can. Simply add a teaspoon of plain old white vinegar or lemon juice to the cream and stir.
There is a small problem, the sour taste is like sour. If you're making lemon spaghetti sauce, that's good for you, but what if you're not? In any case, a little acid can balance the weight of the fat, but you can mask the taste if you want. Plain cream with vinegar or lemon juice on the flavor with a hint of cheese. This is traceable considering how cheese and yogurt are made with similar ingredients. I recommend leaning towards the cheese flavor. Add a few tablespoons of tangy cheese such as Parmesan, Pecorino, Gruyere, or some nutritional yeast to the sauce. Add savory spices such as garlic powder, onion powder, or paprika. Sprinkle with some fresh or dried herbs. Your cream sauce can be creamy, but it doesn't have to be ordinary.
You can use this thickening technique with any creamy sauce and just start small. Depending on the other ingredients you're swimming in, there may already be some acid. Just add a little lemon juice, maybe half a teaspoon at a time, and see how it goes. The recipe for this creamy Parmesan pasta sauce is enough to hold "one serving" of pasta. (A spaghetti box with two ounces of pasta written on it is sufficient.) Burst. If you're making more than two ounces of pasta, just multiply them together.