Here's How To Properly Thicken Up Alfredo Sauce

Alfredo sauce is a cheesy, creamy delight to slather onto your favorite pasta. And like all things pasta, fresh is best when it comes to Alfredo sauce. But if your cooked sauce is coming out thin, adding viscosity can seem tricky with so few ingredients in the sauce in the first place. Luckily, the best way to thicken up this cheese sauce is simple: add more cheese.

The virtue of thickening up an Alfredo by adding more cheese is, in a sense, obvious. Alfredo sauce has few ingredients — often just cream, butter, garlic, and a lot of cheese. Since the sauce is already overwhelmingly cheese, adding even more freshly grated cheese at the end won't ruin the flavor. If anything, it will improve it.

Adding more cheese is definitely the best and most delicious way to add body to a loose Alfredo sauce. But if you're either out of parmesan or too concerned with the calorie count of your buttered cheese sauce, there are other ways to thicken it up too.

Like many sauces and gravies, Alfredo sauce can be thickened up with a little more cooking. Before adding cheese, simmer and stir the cream over a low heat for a long time, until the liquid condenses down the desired amount. The more you reduce, the richer your final sauce will taste. However, the original Alfredo sauce recipe was only butter and cheese, with no cream to reduce, so it may not be a good fit if you're going traditional.

Another way to thicken your thin Alfredo sauce actually involves the pasta. Toss raw pasta in flour before cooking it to create a highly starchy water, enough of which will remain on your noodles after draining to add body to your Alfredo. This is great for a pasta dish, but unhelpful for Alfredo as a dipping sauce, like what comes with Olive Garden's famous breadsticks.

A third, cheese-less way to thicken an Alfredo involves a culinary standby: the venerable cornstarch slurry. One part cornstarch to one part water, thoroughly mixed separately and slowly stirred into the Alfredo will thicken the sauce right up while adding a glossy smoothness to the texture.