Want instant dinner ideas? Stock your cabinet with Asian sauces
“Soy sauce, fish sauce, miso paste.” Dale Talde was making a list: Pantry items you need if you want to cook better during the week.
“Sambal oelek,” he continued, referring to the Indonesian chile sauce. “Gochujang,” the thick, fermented Korean red-pepper sauce. “Shrimp paste,” a mash of fermented ground shrimp blended with salt.
Talde’s restaurant in Brooklyn, Talde, uses many of those condiments in its dishes and a new cookbook, “Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes From the Philippines to Brooklyn.”
“You melt some butter into any one of those jams, and you’ll have a fantastic pan sauce,” he said. “Put it on fish. Put it on a piece of chicken. Drizzle it on rice, and you’re eating an amazing meal.”
Cooking during the week can be a hassle. A little planning and a vaguely Asian-American larder can make it easier.
“It’s so easy to buy a few containers of stuff and play with them and really come up with something good and easy in the middle of the week,” said Hooni Kim, the chef and owner of Danji and Hanjan restaurants in Manhattan.
Even if you are new to these flavors, there is no reason to be intimidated by them. (Or to be worried that they will spoil if you don’t use them all the time. Miso – fermented soy bean paste, a staple of the Japanese larder – will last in your refrigerator for roughly the life of the appliance. Gochujang, likewise.) Using them is no different from improvising a marinade with ingredients you use every day, or brushing a piece of fish with mustard and brown sugar before sliding it into the oven. You are simply adding new flavors, often to familiar recipes.
Take some ground pork, Kim suggested, and sauté it with ginger and garlic, as an Italian cook might do with garlic and onions. Chinese cooks do this in preparation for making a fiery mapo tofu.
“But then instead of a spicy base,” he said, “stir some miso paste into the meat, and you’ll have what amounts to an Asian ragù you could put on rice or noodles.”
Blend that miso paste with butter, as Talde suggests, and you have a glaze for chicken, fish, pork or beef, enhanced by a splash of rice vinegar. Swap it out for gochujang, and you have the same dish, a little more Korean.
Fry some good steak in cornstarch batter and toss it in a sauce made with orange zest and sugar, rice vinegar, soy and fish sauce: Chinese-American takeout food in 30 minutes, 300 times better than anything you could pick up on the way home.
“It’s like a graph,” Talde said. “Those five condiments and butter and an acid. Those five things and mayonnaise and an acid. That’s two weeks’ worth of sauces right there. Then repeat. Or combine.”
It is not expensive to cook this way.
“Buying Asian condiments is cheap,” says Talde. “They’re like $2. Does it look like chile paste on the label? It probably is chile paste! You’re not ever going to go horribly wrong.”
10 Asian essentials
▪ Chili sauce: There are infinite varieties of these fiery sauces and pastes. They add a piquant note to sauces and marinades, or you can use them as a condiment.
▪ Fish sauce: An intensely pungent brew of anchovies, salt and water. Use it in moderation to deliver big flavor to sauces and marinades. Add a 1/4 teaspoon whenever you make a salad dressing: Instant depth of flavor.
▪ Miso: A traditional Japanese seasoning made of ground fermented soybeans, salt, rice and other ingredients. Use it as a soup base or as part of a sauce, glaze or marinade.
▪ Noodles: Asian noodles may be made from rice or wheat, buckwheat, yam or mung bean. Start with wheat-based lo mein or udon noodles, then branch out into rice vermicelli, chow fun or Korean jap che, made from sweet-potato starch.
▪ Oyster sauce: A viscous, dark, sweet and salty sauce made by combining cooked oysters (or often “oyster essence”) with a slurry of sweetened cornstarch and soy sauce. The vegetarian version is flavored with mushrooms.
▪ Rice: A staple across Asia. Start with plain long-grain white rice, but experiment with short-grain, brown and jasmine.
▪ Rice vinegar: A mild vinegar from fermented rice wine. Use it to flavor sauces, marinades and rice.
▪ Rice wine: Use as you might white wine or vermouth, to add an aromatic note to sauces or marinades.
▪ Soy sauce: Use it in place of salt in glazes, sauces, stir-fries and soup. Tamari sauce is a gluten-free alternative.
▪ Toasted sesame oil: A flavor enhancer to finish dishes or provide a round, deep flavor to sauces and marinades.
Orange Beef
For the sauce:
1 tablespoon neutral oil
1 (1 1/2-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and minced
2 tablespoons orange zest, plus the juice of one orange
3 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup rice vinegar (do not use seasoned rice vinegar)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon fish sauce
For the beef:
1 large egg white
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 pinch kosher salt
1 boneless rib-eye steak, approximately 1 to 1 1/2 pounds, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/4 cup neutral oil
6 green onions, white and green parts, cut into inch-long pieces
2 to 4 dried red chiles, or to taste
Make the sauce: Heat oil in a small saucepan over medium-high heat. When it begins to shimmer, add ginger, jalapeño and orange zest and stir to combine. Sauté mixture until ingredients soften, 2 to 3 minutes, then add garlic and cook until it softens, 1 to 2 minutes.
Add orange juice, brown sugar, rice vinegar, soy sauce and fish sauce and stir to combine. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until it thickens and reduces by half, approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
Prepare the meat: Combine egg white, cornstarch and salt in a bowl. Add steak, tossing to coat the meat with the batter.
In a large skillet or wok set over high heat, heat oil until it shimmers and is about to smoke. Add beef to the pan or wok in a single layer and cook without stirring until the bottoms of the pieces are crisp and golden, approximately 60 to 90 seconds. Add white pieces of green onion and the chiles, then turn the beef pieces and cook the other sides, stirring occasionally, about 3 minutes more for medium-rare. Transfer to a platter.
Pour orange sauce into the hot pan or wok, let it boil and stir it as it thickens. Add meat and white green onions and stir to coat. Return meat and sauce to the platter and scatter green onion tops over the top. Serve with steamed broccoli and white rice.
Yield: 4 servings
Miso-Butter Chicken
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup white miso
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon rice vinegar (not seasoned rice vinegar)
Black pepper, to taste
8 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs, approximately 2 1/2 to 3 pounds
Heat oven to 425 degrees. Combine butter, miso, honey, rice vinegar and black pepper in a large bowl and mix with a spatula or spoon until it is well combined.
Add chicken to the bowl and massage the miso-butter mixture all over it. Place the chicken in a single layer in a roasting pan and slide it into the oven. Roast for 30 to 40 minutes, turning the chicken pieces over once or twice, until the skin is golden brown and crisp, and the internal temperature of the meat is 160 to 165 degrees.
Yield: 4 servings
Baby Bok Choy With Oyster Sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
3 1/2 tablespoons oyster sauce
Pinch of sugar
2 tablespoons rice vinegar (not seasoned rice vinegar)
1 tablespoon neutral oil
1 tablespoon finely minced garlic
4 to 6 bunches of baby bok choy, approximately 1 1/2 pounds, cleaned, with ends trimmed
Combine soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and rice vinegar in a bowl and set aside.
Heat oil in a skillet or wok set over high heat. When it shimmers, add garlic, then bok choy, and stir-fry for 2 minutes. Add 2 to 3 tablespoons water to the skillet or wok, then cover and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until bok choy has softened at its base.
Remove bok choy from the skillet or wok and place it on a warmed platter. Drizzle the reserved sauce over the greens and serve.
Yield: 4 servings
This story was originally published October 27, 2015 at 1:11 PM with the headline "Want instant dinner ideas? Stock your cabinet with Asian sauces."