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Have you visited an Asian grocery store lately? They’re not as scarce as they once were. As the Asian-American population moves inland from its coastal hubs, major Asian supermarket chains, such as 99 Ranch Markets, owned by Tawa Supermarkets, Inc., Buena Park, CA, and Diho Markets, Westmont, IL, have followed, opening branches throughout America’s heartland and the South. Pay a visit, plant yourself in the sauce aisle and survey the surrounding plenty, gazing at shelf after shelf of bottles, jars and squeeze tubes. Containers filled with pastes as thick as wet cement sit next to bottles of liquid amber that glow from within. Red labels decorated with sunny pastoral scenes or iconic images of pandas, crabs and tigers vie for attention, while yielding little about their contents. One might ask: “This bottle of orange stuff with the rooster decal: What’s that for? And the jar over there filled with some sort of translucent, chunky preserve — it says plum sauce, but is it the right kind? And which of these 65 different soy sauces has the least sodium?” Navigating the Asian-sauce aisle can be disorienting, even for those fluent in conversational Thai or Korea’s written-character system. But there’s no use hiding, particularly for product developers: Asian cuisines, and the scads of attending sauces, are here to stay. That may give rookies some heavy homework, but an intimate acquaintance with Asia’s sauces generates boundless product-design opportunities. With some grounding in the basics of Asian cuisine and philosophy, those sauce aisles won’t look so scary after all.
Not so with Western sauces. Cooking students taking on the European — specifically the French — canon of classic sauces steel themselves for months of rigorous hands-on training. They brown vats of meat bones and vegetables until they know how to develop optimum color and flavor, trash countless burnt bricks of flour and butter before they nail the timing of the perfect roux, and hover for hours over simmering cauldrons in pursuit of the spoon-coating consistency of a perfectly reduced sauce. Then there’s memorizing sauce taxonomies and the “official” ingredients that make a sauce espagnole truly espagnole. Students understand that a sauce is not something to treat lightly, but may also come away believing that everything about sauces — their construction, composition and “correct” serving suggestions — falls under the sway of a strict set of carefully observed rules. Shift the focus to Asia and the European rules go out the window, inadequate to describe Asia’s near-endless sauce repertoire. That’s why Asian sauces stretch the bounds of infinity: Freed from the strictures of culinary dogma, the number of achievable sauces knows no limits. “There are as many Asian sauces as there are ideas, creative thoughts and imaginations,” Rust says. Stripping away formality in favor of creative freedom, most Asian sauces originate in the home kitchen, on the fly, and without culinary training, standardized recipes or even measuring spoons. It’s a freshly egalitarian approach to flavoring foods. Wyman Chor, president, Accord Foods Inc., Henrietta, NY, says: “You’ve just got to be creative. It’s only when people don’t know that they have the freedom to combine flavors the way they like that it gets complicated.” As chef Martin Yan, founder of Yan Can Cook, and an internationally recognized authority on Asian cuisine, sees it: “In the West, preparing and serving food is more rigid — you can’t drink white wine with this, you’d never serve red wine with that. ... In Asia, it’s more flexible. Go to a typical Japanese, Korean, Thai, Chinese or Vietnamese restaurant and they hand you a whole book. They have to number items to keep track of them. That’s precisely the result of all these ingredients, sauces, flavors and cooking methods coming together in all sorts of ways. By ‘crossbreeding’ the available ingredients, techniques and flavor profiles, you generate thousands of different dishes.” This freewheeling culinary ethos may give inventiveness a lot of latitude, but it’s disingenuous to say that anything goes. Asian cuisine’s path across the national palate is stained with sauces that, best intentions aside, didn’t fly with American audiences or the discriminating consumers who call Asian food home-cooking. But rather than conform to rules that are imposed from on high, proper Asian sauces instead are shaped by principles that emerge from an internalized understanding of Asian philosophy itself. It may sound “New Age-y,” but there’s nothing new about this millennia-old philosophy, which might be summed up in one word: balance.
Although everything has a certain yin-to-yang ratio, most items, foods included, lean toward one force or the other. Tofu, cucumbers, some types of fish and steamed foods are heavy in yin, whereas fatty meats, ginger, garlic, vinegar and fried foods pack more yang punch. Practitioners of Asia’s culinary arts and its age-old homeopathic medicine believe that balancing the contrasting yin and yang forces in a dish not only boosts its health-promoting credentials but makes it taste better, too. This results in a cuisine that harmonizes contradictory flavors, colors and textures. In sweet-and-sour pork alone, the crispy fried pork — a yang food if ever there was one — counters the soft-textured yin of cubed fruits and vegetables. And it’s all balanced in a sauce that itself maintains equilibrium between yang’s acidic bite and the sweetness of yin. “When you taste a good sweet-and-sour sauce, you can taste the sweetness and you can taste the sourness but, overall, there’s a perfect balance,” says Yan. “It’s just like when you go to a concert. There are all kinds of instruments, and when everything is in tune and under the control of the right conductor, you get the right notes; the right sounds; the right tones. And if you close your eyes, you’ll never be able to tell which instrument is playing which part. It comes together in a perfect balance all its own. It’s the same with Asian sauces.” Blending sweet, sour and savory within a single dish still surprises Western palates accustomed to keeping main dishes savory and delaying sweetness until dessert. “A typical dressing, like a vinaigrette, had been mostly just sour in the past,” observes Yan. “But now you’ve got honey mustards that bring the sweetness and spiciness — two flavors that make Thai cuisine so famous — to the standard sour vinaigrette.” As chefs and product developers nab more moves from Asia’s flavor-blending playbook, the chile peppers, lime juice and palm sugar they add to familiar Western marinades and dressings will give those products an Asian accent that distinguishes them from their forebears. “All of a sudden, you create a totally different dimension. And I think you’ve just got to see it as a philosophy of blending ingredients and balancing flavors,” he says. Yan cites a typical Western hot sauce as an example of an American standard that could benefit from an Asian adjustment. “Hot-pepper sauces in the U.S., basically, are similar in formula. They’re just heat with a little bit of vinegar in them to act as a preservative and to balance the flavor a little,” he says. “But you try an Asian chile sauce, and they use garlic, anchovy, dried shrimp, black beans, soybean paste and sweet potatoes or yams. They add a variety of flavor to make it a more-complex chile sauce. It’s more flavor than just heat.” Another example: barbecue sauce. “It’s usually got a heavy, smoky flavor with a little bit of sugar in there,” says Yan. “But when you barbecue meat, you’ve already got smoke. You add those two smoky flavors together and they overpower everything so much that all you smell and taste is smoke. That’s not the balance we like in Asian cuisines.” Substituting ginger, pickled plum or a shot of toasted sesame oil for heavy smoke hits the major taste targets while giving barbecue sauce an Asian passport stamp. Contrast and balance influences food preparation and service in Asia, as well. “Asian cuisine is about cooking several things together,” Yan says. “In the West, you grill, pan-fry or barbecue a piece of meat by itself. And when you serve it, you may sprinkle some salt and pepper on it, and top it with a sauce. And when you cook your vegetables, you always do them by themselves and differently than you do the meat. And they get their own sauce, too.” Asian meals are loath to segregate the meat from the starch from the greens, treating each dish, instead, as “a one-dish meal, a complete composition in itself,” he says. “And you marry all those elements — tie them all together — with the sauce.” Text FOODPRODUCT to 41411 to receive this media snap on your smart phone |
SupplySide
Sauces with an Asian Accent
Posted in
Articles,
Ethnic,
Flavor,
Herb,
Sauces,
Seafood,
Sensory,
Sodium,
Soy,
Spices,
Sweeteners,
Topics,
Sauces / Gravies / Soup,
Seasonings / Spices
