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Thickening Agents
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Published 2025
A sauce must be thick enough to cling lightly to the food. Otherwise, it will just run off and lie in a puddle in the plate. This doesn’t mean it should be heavy and pasty. Chefs use the term nappé (nap pay; from the French napper, meaning “to top”) to describe the texture of a sauce that has the right texture to coat foods.
An unthickened sauce doesn’t effectively add flavor to foods because it simply runs off them. But making a sauce too thick also decreases its flavor, for several reasons. First, the thickener dilutes the flavor because it adds bulk to the sauce without adding any flavor of its own. Second, it slows down the flow of the sauce so that it doesn’t reach all the taste buds as well. And third, the thickener actually binds up or absorbs some of the flavor compounds so we can’t sense them. So it is important to achieve just the right nappé texture when thickening sauces.