What is thickening?
Thickening is a technique, which mixes starch with water and pours it into soup when the dish is close to maturity, making the dish shiny, smooth and tender. Thickening is one of the necessary skills to increase the color and taste of dishes. To learn to thicken, the first step is to understand starch. The raw material of thicken is mainly starch, because starch is insoluble in water. When it is heated to 60 degrees with water, it will gelatinize into a colloidal solution, so that soup and vegetables can be integrated. There are many kinds of starch used for thickening, mainly including potato starch, sweet potato starch, corn starch, wheat starch, mung bean starch, etc., in addition to water chestnut starch, water chestnut starch, lotus root starch, pea starch and so on. But the most commonly used in the family are the following five:
1, potato starch
Potato starch, also known as potato starch, is the most viscous, delicate, crystal clear and shiny after thickening, so it is the most used starch in the family at present. Potato starch can also be used to make western-style bread or cakes to increase the sense of wetness. Usually I use potato starch to thicken dishes.
2. Corn starch
Corn starch is also one of the commonly used starches in the family. Corn starch is white and yellowish, which contains a small amount of fat and protein. It has strong hygroscopicity and high viscosity, but its thickening effect is not as good as potato starch, resulting in white precipitate.
The soup thickened with potato starch will become thinner after cooling, while the soup thickened with corn starch will not change after cooling.
3. Cassava starch
It is refined from cassava, with white texture and transparent powder, and has good thickening or sizing effect.
4. Wheat starch
Wheat starch, also called Chengfen, is white in color but poor in luster, and its quality is not as good as potato starch, so it is easy to precipitate after thickening. However, as the production of some pasta, it plays a very important role, which can make the finished product crystal clear in color and strong in taste.
5. Pea starch
Sticky enough, low water absorption. The color is white and shiny. In addition to thickening, it is also a good material for making vermicelli and bean jelly, but it is rarely used at home.
There are many kinds of thickeners. The simplest one is to mix water and starch evenly and use it as thicken juice. If you add some seasonings such as rice wine, soy sauce and vinegar to thicken the juice, it is called thickening juice. According to the consistency of fruit juice, there are two main types of thickening: thin thickening and thick thickening, which are also the two most commonly used.
Thin and thick: thin and thick juice is thinner. After thickening, if it is a big dish or a whole dish, part of the soup is hung on the dish and part of it flows into the dish from the dish. If it is a subdivided dish, the soup will be as thin as rice soup, which is generally used for stewing and cooking.
Thick glutinous rice: Thick glutinous rice refers to a kind of glutinous rice with high starch concentration and less water or other liquid seasonings. After this juice is thickened, the soup is very thick and is wrapped on the surface of the raw materials. After being put into the dish, the soup still does not separate and flow, and there is basically no juice in the dish after eating, which is generally used for dishes cooked by slippery, slippery and stewed methods.
In addition to thickness, there are two thickening methods: pouring juice and pouring juice.
Pouring sauce: When the dish is nearly ripe, pour the prepared sauce into the pot and gently push it evenly with a spatula while pouring, or slowly shake the pot with one hand and pour the sauce evenly with the other hand until the soup and the dish are completely blended.
Pouring sauce: If the dish is too big to stir in the pot, you can eat it when the raw materials are almost ripe, and pour the prepared sauce into the pot to heat it. After the sauce is thick, it can be poured evenly on the dish.
Several key points of thickening:
The ratio of starch to water is appropriate.
The general ratio is 1: 1.5. This ratio can be appropriately adjusted according to the choice of thickness, but the difference cannot be too much. If there is more starch but less water, the particles in the starch are difficult to completely dissolve in water, which leads to acne. If there is less starch and more water, the juice of vegetables will increase, which will affect the ripening speed and taste of vegetables.
Grasp the time of thickening.
Cooking requires a crisp, tender, refreshing, smooth and soft taste. Generally, the sauce is poured after the dish is cooked. It is easy to burn the sauce if it is put too early, and it is easy to heat the dish for a long time and lose its crisp and tender taste if it is put too late. Boiled, stewed and roasted dishes are best thickened when they are fully cooked, otherwise it will affect the softness, smoothness and crispness of the dishes.
After thickening, you can pour in seasoning oil.
After thickening, it is sprinkled with various seasoning oils, which has the functions of enhancing fragrance, refreshing and coloring. These oils mainly include chicken oil, sesame oil, pepper oil and Chili oil. There are also many common household sesame oils. However, the seasoning oil must be thickened before it can be poured in. You can't add too much oil. Too much oil will hinder the packaging of sauce to ingredients, thus losing the meaning of thickening. In addition, after pouring the seasoning oil, don't turn it too fast to avoid oil separation and thickening.
4. thicken after determining the taste.
If you thicken the sauce first and then heat it, it will become sticky, and the material will not enter the material itself, which will affect the taste of the dish. However, if salt, vinegar, soy sauce, etc. Fruit juice can be directly thickened and seasoned by adding it in the blending process.
5. Control the temperature during thickening.
Generally speaking, after the sauce is put into the pot, it is necessary to quickly raise the temperature of the soup in the pot with fire and keep it boiling all the time, so as to make the color of the sauce brighter.
References:
1. How to improve the skills of bold web links
2. Link to Baidu Encyclopedia page
3. The role of "skills" linking to web pages
Extended content: The academic concept of thickening is that starch has the characteristics of water absorption, adhesion, smoothness and cleanliness when gelatinized by heat. When the dishes are close to maturity, the prepared powder juice is poured into the pot to thicken the marinade and increase the adhesion of the marinade to the raw materials, thus increasing the powder and concentration of the soup and improving the color and taste of the dishes.
Whether thickening is suitable or not has a great influence on the quality of dishes, so thickening is one of the basic skills of cooking. Thickening is mostly used in cooking techniques such as stir-frying, sliding vegetables and frying. What these cooking methods have in common is that the dishes cooked in this way basically do not contain soup. However, due to the addition of some seasonings and the moisture of raw materials, the soup in the dish is increased. By thickening, the juice is thick and attached to the surface of raw materials, thus achieving the luster, smoothness, tenderness and delicious flavor of dishes.
(1) Increase the viscosity and concentration of vegetable soup. When cooking dishes, add some soup or liquid seasonings (such as soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, cooking wine and other seasonings), and at the same time, some water overflows from the raw materials after heating, which becomes the soup of dishes. These soups are too thin to adhere to the raw materials, which affects the "taste". After thickening, the viscosity and concentration of the soup increased, making the soup blend and delicious.
② Keep the dishes crisp and tender. This effect is most obvious when skimming vegetables. For example, skimming vegetables is characterized by crispy outside and soft inside. If the sauce doesn't thicken, it will directly penetrate into the surface of the raw materials, making the fried raw materials soft and destroying the effect of crispy outside and soft inside. After the sauce is thickened, the thickening juice wrapped on the surface of the raw materials is not easy to penetrate because of starch gelatinization, and the flavor characteristics of the dishes are maintained.
(3) The soup and vegetables are integrated, and the main ingredients are prominent. For some dishes made by cooking methods such as stewing, stewing and roasting, there are many soups, and the umami flavor of raw materials and the flavor of various seasonings should be dissolved in the soup, which is particularly delicious. Ingredients and soup can't be mixed together. Only after thickening, due to the gelatinization of starch, the concentration of soup increases, which makes soup and vegetables blend together, which not only increases the taste of vegetables, but also produces a special flavor of soft, smooth and tender. After thickening, the soup becomes thicker, the buoyancy increases, and the main ingredients float and stand out, which changes the phenomenon that you can't see the dishes when you see the soup.
(4) Make the dishes beautiful in shape and bright in color. Because starch becomes sticky after heating, it produces a unique luster, which can more vividly reflect the color of dishes and condiments.
(5) It can keep dishes warm. Because the sauce is sticky after heating, it wraps the appearance of raw materials, reduces the heat dissipation inside the dish, and can keep the heat of the dish for a long time.
Although thickening is an important means to improve the taste, color and shape of dishes, it is by no means necessary to thicken every dish. The timing of thickening and whether it is necessary to thicken should be decided according to the characteristics and requirements of the dishes. Some special dishes should be thickened before the main ingredients are served. For example, "hot and sour soup" and "emerald shrimp soup" The egg liquid and shrimps are thickened and put into the pot, which can shorten the heating time, highlight the main ingredients and increase the smoothness of the dishes.