Homemade sauces are easy — and a key part of adding flavor to plenty of dishes. If you’ve ever cooked your own sauce, you know that one of the best ways to thicken sauce is to naturally let it reduce. A sauce reduces thanks to evaporation, which happens when water leaves the sauce in the form of steam. If you keep a lid on a pot, the sauce won’t reduce as much. The same rules apply when sauce is cooking in the oven. Your sauce will thicken, but how much it thickens depends on a few factors.
If you place a lidded Dutch oven in the oven, the sauce won’t thicken as much. That’s because as the steam evaporates, it gets trapped on the lid, where it turns back into water thanks to condensation. That water then drips down into the sauce, essentially contradicting the evaporation process. Cooking sauce in the oven without a lid will thicken it more efficiently, but keep in mind the ingredients you’re cooking with it.
Sauce will thicken in the oven
The short answer is yes, sauce will get thicker due to the oven’s heat. Besides using a lid or not, the ingredients also play a role in how thick the sauce gets. When you roast vegetables, for example, they release moisture because they contain so much water. If you’re cooking raw veggies in a sauce, you can expect the sauce won’t thicken much due to the water content the vegetables release as they heat. Chicken releases plenty of moisture, too, so any chicken cooked in sauce will likely counteract that natural thickening process.
The best way to help sauce thicken in the oven is to keep it uncovered and pre-cook any meat or vegetables you plan to add to it. You don’t have to cook them thoroughly because the oven will do that, but give ingredients like vegetables and chicken a quick sear on the stove to help remove some of that moisture before they’re cooked in sauce.
