Hi, I'm Tom Reinhart, corporate chef here at Beacons, and I want to show you how to make a really fast and great sauce. It's called a balsamic reduction sauce. And we're going to start off with just a saute pan using a nice big wide one, it's flared side. I'm going to take a bottle of just store-bought balsamic vinegar. Nothing really special. This is the covalvera brand, and you can get it pretty much in any store. Covalvera is one of the largest importers of Italian products here in the U.S. I'm going to put the whole bottle in. The trick is if you're going to make it, you might as well make a big batch of it. So I'm going to get that going. I'm going to bring it up to a boil over here. I'm going to turn my cooktop on. I'm going to turn it up to high. We're going to bring this up to a boil. The entire intent is to cook away most of the water, about half of it, or maybe two-thirds of it, and it's going to reduce it. It's going to intensify the flavors. It's going to make it really thick and syrupy. Now you'll see a lot of times recipes we'll call for adding herbs, garlic, shallots to it. You just straight-ball sonic vinegar, you get a lot of versatility. You can use it for a dessert sauce later on. You can use it for a meat sauce. You can always add the other flavors later on. It gives you a lot of versatility in the sauce right now. It keeps really well in a plastic squeeze bottle and your refrigerator. It'll take about 20 minutes to reduce that down to the thickness that we want. In the meantime, I'll go ahead and start preparing. We're going to make a little caprici salad. I'm going to slice up some tomatoes here. Maybe a little mozzarella cheese. After about 20 minutes of boiling away, you'll notice that it's lost about half of its liquid. I'm going to turn it down to a light simmer there, and you can see the line where the original level was on the liquid. It's gone down to about half that amount. I'm going to go ahead and give it a little stir here. The consistency we're looking for is that it should hold a line on the back of a spoon when you draw on your finger like that. That's about as thick as we want. Keep in mind that as it cools down, it will tend to thicken up a little bit more, and it's really important not to burn it. At that point, we're ready to take it. We put it into a little decanter so we can just take that. Just great to size. Get some of the thickness off of there. We just pour it right into a squeeze bottle. This has a beautifully intense flavor. It's nice and thick. It's great for putting on steaks. You put it on ice cream, strawberries. We're going to put a little caprici salad here. I'm going to take a couple of nice, like cut tomatoes. A little fresh mozzarella. Shingle them and alternate them. Take a little bit of balsamic glaze. Look how beautifully thick that is. A little bit of fresh basil. A little bit of balsamic glaze. I'm going to put a little caprici salad. If you'd like to learn more about cooking, come see us at Beacon's Cooking School.