Soy sauce is awesome.
Sometimes also just referred to as stir fry sauce, it’s a wonderful way to add texture, taste, and consistency to your recipes.
With additional thickening, soy sauce can improve all these key qualities in your dishes.
How Can You Thicken Soy Sauce?
There are three key methods to get a thick soy sauce; use a starch, make a reduction, or add sugar. Let’s take a look at each of them.
How To Thicken Stir Fry Sauce With A Starch Thickener
Rice starch or sweet rice flour are great choices for a thickening agent but cornflour will do in a pinch too.
First, you’ll need some soy sauce and you can use as much as you want here, though be warned as you thicken sauce it sometimes loses a little flavor.
Then you want to mix the starch in water so have half a cup handy.
Then you need two teaspoons of your starch – use the starches above (rice starch, etc.) or even wheat flour or potato starch if you want to.
You can also add a little brown sugar at this stage to make your soy sauce thicker still. And feel free to throw in extra seasonings to help boost the flavor.
OK, you thicken sauce by mixing the starch and water (no clumps left behind, please). Simmer the soy sauce and then add the starch mix. Stir and it should take about 5 minutes on medium heat to get the result you want.
How To Thicken Soy Sauce Reductions
A reduction basically relies on the fact that as you heat it soy sauce evaporates and what’s left is much thicker.
This is a typical Taiwanese thick soy sauce and it’s super easy to make.
All you need is a saucepan and spoon and then heat it until you get the desired consistency.
But to be fair, we’d recommend that you add some fresh minced garlic, some chili flakes, a touch of oyster sauce, and maybe even a hint of sesame oil if you want to make that perfect stir fry.
We love eating stir fry with this kind of base and we’re sure that you will too.
How To Thicken Soy Sauce With Brown Sugar
Finally, we have a method for transforming soy sauce to something akin to a teriyaki sauce.
You’re going to need two teaspoons of sugar (adjust to taste) and a quarter cup of water to make this work.
Then you place the sauce into a saucepan on the stovetop and then blend in the water and sugar. Stire this well as it heats, you don’t want the sugar to stick to the bottom of the pan and caramelize.
You want it to thoroughly dissolve in the water. You could also substitute honey for the sugar if you want – this can make it much easier to get your sauce as thick as you want it to be.
We like to add a little salt at the end of the process to just offset the sweetness and honor the savory dishes that we use soy sauce in.
Final Thoughts On Thickening Soy Sauce
It’s super easy to get your soy sauce to the thickness that you want it to be using any of the methods outlined above. And it makes such a difference to the quality of the dishes that you make.
Speaking of dishes, if you want to make the most of soy sauce, check out some of our favorite cookbooks here.