All About Asian Sauces

Asian cuisine is extremely multifaceted.  Indeed, Asia is the world’s largest continent and home to more countries than any other land mass.  To make things exponentially more diverse, most countries have manifold cuisines, each emanating from varying geographic locations.  China, Thailand and India are just a few examples of nations with heterogeneous culinary profiles.

One of the things that I love about Asian cooking is the heavy reliance on flavoring agents such as spices, hot peppers, and particularly sauces.  Asian cooking embraces all kinds of sauces, many of them piquant, salty, and sharply flavored.  Experimenting with these sauces will absolutely broaden your culinary horizons.  With that goal in mind I present to you a list of well-known Asian sauces.  I didn’t include soy sauce, despite my deep passion for it.  Everyone is cognizant of soy sauce.  I wish to take you deeper into the delicious and zesty world of Asian sauces.  While all large American supermarkets carry most or all of these sauces, your best bet is an Asian market for the best brands and prices.

HOISIN SAUCE

Also known as Peking sauce or more colloquially Chinese barbeque sauce, Hoisin sauce, like traditional American barbeque sauce, is sweet and spicy.  As with all of the sauces yet to be showcased, Hoisin can vary from chef to chef, region to region, and from one manufacturer to another.  Nevertheless, the most common ingredients include water, sugar, soybeans, vinegar, salt, flour, and of course, chile peppers.  It is employed as both a flavoring agent and as a table condiment in all kinds of meat, poultry and fish dishes.  It is used to make Chinese barbequed pork, the well known American-Chinese restaurant spare ribs, and many Vietnamese dishes as well.  Hoisin sauce is the condiment of choice for the classic Peking duck.  Strips of the roasted duck meat are placed in a “pancake,” (basically a thin tortilla), with Hoisin, green onion, and cucumber.  It is then rolled and eaten like a soft taco.

DUCK SAUCE

Duck sauce, a.k.a. plum sauce, is actually an American invention and found in literally every American-Chinese restaurant.  Interestingly, its aquatic-fowl title came from American-Chinese restaurants who served it with Peking duck, as opposed to the traditional Hoisin sauce.  It is a thick, sweet and sour sauce made from plums, apricots or peaches, vinegar, ginger and chiles, although it packs no discernable punch.  American origins or not, duck sauce is an omnipresent dipping sauce for ribs, egg rolls, spring rolls, shrimp toast, General Tso’s chicken, and other fried yum-yums.

OYSTER SAUCE

OK, now we get back to our Asian roots.  Oyster sauce is a thick, dark brown sauce beloved in Chinese and Thai cuisine.  As its name implies it is made from oysters, as well as brine and soy sauce.  When purchasing oyster sauce make sure to read the ingredient list on the label.  As with all products, the ingredients are listed in descending order by weight.  Cheap oyster sauces are comprised mostly of water while quality brands are primarily oysters.  Naturally I advise that you to part with an extra George Washington or two and procure the good stuff.  Oyster sauce imparts a rich and savory dimension to food.  While it can serve as a condiment, it is more likely utilized as a flavoring component of stir fries, noodle dishes and marinades.

FISH SAUCE

As gross as it may sound, fish sauce is made from the liquid of salted fermented fish, usually anchovies.  It is renowned throughout Southeast Asia.  Depending on the admixture, chiles, sugar, salt and a variety of other spices are added.  It is both a condiment and a flavor-enhancing building block of multifarious dishes and other sauces.  It is very intensely flavored and thus a little goes a long way.  Straight fish sauce may taste a little funky to some people but when blended with other ingredients a whole new dimension of flavor is created.  For dumplings, egg rolls, and other dip-friendly victuals try a combination of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, hot chile oil, and a few squirts of fish sauce.  The primordial fish sauce was garum, a likewise fish-fermented concoction invented by the Romans.

BLACK BEAN SAUCE

More of a paste than a sauce, black bean sauce, also called douchi, is not made from the black beans familiar to Latin Cuisine.  Rather it is fabricated from fermented soy beans.  The resulting product looks similar to Latin black beans.  Black bean sauce is salty and very pungent.  Like fish sauce, it should also be applied in moderation.  It is also incorporated into all sorts of concoctions: stir fries, vegetable, meat, poultry and fish recipes.   Clams in black bean sauce make for a very tasty combination.  Two variants, black bean and garlic sauce and hot black bean sauce, (with chile peppers of course), are particularly delicious.

SRIRACHA & SAMBAL

Sriracha and Sambal are both hot and very spicy chile based sauces widely popular throughout Southeast Asia.  Sriracha is also known as “rooster sauce” from the iconic rooster found on the bottle.  Once again, exact recipes fluctuate widely.  Even the chiles that form the base of these sauces run the gamut and include Thai chiles, cayenne, jalapenos, habaneros and countless other varieties.  Then, vinegar, garlic, salt, sugar, citrus juices, you name it, are included.  Sriracha and Sambal function as both an ingredient and a condiment.  But beware; these bad boys are not for the faint of heart.  They pack a serious punch of heat.  While the sky is the limit in terms of uses, I am especially fond of these sauces slathered on duck, ribs or fried chicken wings.

Chef Mark R. Vogel
FoodForThought.com

Warning - these Chocolate Covered Cocoa Beans are addictive!

Every once in awhile you come across a product that is truly a cut above anything else you have ever tried. Tom Pedersen’s chocolate covered cocoa beans are just such a product.

He starts out with the finest South American whole cocoa beans he can find and roasts them to perfection. They are then dipped in 3 layers of the best chocolate available – white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate and then dusted with cocoa powder.
Pricey? Yes, but for a holiday treat, especially for anyone who loves the flavor of real cocoa; these are the perfect holiday gift.  You can read more about these morsels of delight and find out how to order them on their web site at Cocoa Puro Kaka’Wa Cocoa Beans.

I asked Tom Pedersen from Austin, Texas to tell me a little about himself and how he ended up in this business and here’s what I learned:

Tom is a totally “right brain person” who loves art, music, writing and food and has a relentless desire to understand how things work. After graduating from art school and working numerous jobs trying to find one that kept him interested, he decided he should start his own business. As the grandson of a pastry chef who immigrated to the US from Denmark, Tom entertained the idea of pursuing a new career in the food business.

He didn’t want to open a restaurant but rather find a single product that “would be simple, cost very little to start, and could generate some profits” right away.  He looked at craft beers, bread, and cheesecake but kept coming back to chocolate. And because the cocoa bean is the crucial ingredient to making good chocolate, he started learning everything he could about them in his library and on the Internet.

Unfortunately, there was not much written about the cocoa bean at that time, and it was even harder to purchase whole cocoa beans but Tom had the good fortune of meeting the president of a Venezuelan chocolate company online who sent him some of the finest cocoa beans in the world.

The moment he saw them, he was hooked. After roasting them and tasting their flavor, he thought, “Focus on that flavor of the WHOLE bean.” And that is what he did. Tom experimented with different combinations of chocolate and cocoa bean until he finally came up with a recipe that he liked. He then had to find distributors who could offer him what he needed on a small scale; something the industry was not set up to do.

After testing his cocoa beans on friends and family with rave reviews, he decided to rent a stall at a local farmers’ market “to see if our chocolates would sell”. And sell they did. The first day, he sold out of 15 pounds in four hours. He knew he was onto something and received a big boost when Saveur magazine named his cocoa beans one of the 100 editors’ favorites from around the world.

So starting on less than $200 dollars and a good idea, Tom is slowly growing a small family business that he hopes will continue to grow as more and more people learn about the really great taste of cocoa beans covered in “really great chocolates.”

Tom and his wife are putting a lot of effort into making these cocoa beans and are thrilled when people appreciate their hard work. They are by no means getting rich because they have to do everything themselves:  from making the chocolates to running the business, they are there every day working hard to keep the business growing. They love what they do and it shows in the end product.

If you like the flavor of real chocolate, I highly recommend you treat yourself by checking out Tom’s web site and learning more about his chocolates.

Cocoa Puro
Kakawa Cocoa Beans
Pure Whole Bean Chocolate
www.cocoapuro.com

I am a big fan of truffles and I’m talking about the truffles pigs and dogs find in the ground that are used to add their “perfumy fragrance” and intoxicating flavor into a simple pasta dish or bowl of risotto. Hard to find fresh here in the United States and prohibitively expensive even if you are able to find them, I resort to the more modestly priced truffle oil.

I wanted to know more about truffles, how they are found, where they come from in Italy, who can take them from the ground so I asked my friend Lola, who lives in Italy and has been out hunting for truffles many times, to answer some questions I have about this elusive tuber. These are questions I hope you find interesting because Lola’s responses are terrific.

Featured Contributor

Many of you are familiar with Lola from my interview with her and then her brilliant post on Pasta e Fagioli. She is a wonderful food writer whose writing takes you right into her kitchen. I’ve asked Lola to become a featured contributor on The Reluctant Gourmet Cooking Blog so we can all enjoy more of her superb writing. Of course you can get a lot more of her on her own blog, Aglio, Olio & Peperoncino, but it will be great having her join us here.

“I heart tartufi”

I’m glad you asked me to write about truffles, RG,  because I love to speak about the foods I love best. Truffles are in my top 5 favorite foods, along with chocolate, seafood, tomatoes, and basil.

Preposterously elusive, harvested with spy-story secrecy, imbued with an otherworldly mix of  sublime and naughty fragrances and often confused with the fine chocolate with the same name, the truffle has been prized by peasants and nobles alike for centuries.

This quote from the French writer Alexandre Dumas sums up the infatuation:

“The most learned men have been questioned as to the nature of this tuber, and after two thousand years of argument and discussion their answer is the same as it was on the first day: We do not know. The truffles themselves have been interrogated, and have answered simply: Eat us and praise the Lord.”

Are there professional truffle hunters or do locals find them and sell them to distributors? And how deep are truffles buried in the ground?

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