Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes Miso Fish
Asian Essentials for Easy Weeknight Meals
"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.
Mr. Talde has a restaurant in Brooklyn, Talde, that uses many of those condiments in its dishes and a new cookbook, "Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes From the Philippines to Brooklyn," that does the same. "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."
Midweek cooking is a drag. A little planning and a vaguely Asian-American larder can make it easier.
Hooni Kim, the chef and owner of Danji and Hanjan restaurants in Manhattan, was in full agreement. "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," he said.
And it is. Even if you are new to these flavors, at least in your own kitchen, 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Talde suggested, 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 reconfigured, a little more Korean in aspect.
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 brought to you on a bicycle.
"It's like a graph," Mr. 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 an expensive proposition, Mr. Talde added, to cook this way. "Buying Asian condiments," he said, "is cheap. These aren't $40 bottles of olive oil from Eataly," the Italian superstore. "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." Take a spin through an Asian market or online grocery and see.
Look at some cookbooks as well. Mr. Talde's is not alone in utilizing the flavors of the Asian larder in support of midweek cooking. The gang at Lucky Peach magazine is on the verge of releasing its excellent "101 Easy Asian Recipes." Cathy Erway's "Food of Taiwan" has a number of fine, and simple, recipes in it. And Andrew Wong has just released "A. Wong: The Cookbook," with some informal dishes hidden among the more complicated, dim-sum fare.
Returning to the larder, Mr. Kim thought oyster sauce, a viscous blend of sugar, salt and oyster extract, should make the list as well. "Steam some greens and drizzle a little oyster sauce over them," he suggested. "Salty, slightly sweet — perfect with rice."
Mr. Talde agreed. "Thin it out a little with water, then mount butter into it? That's a sick combination," he said.
Whatever the sauce, Mr. Talde and Mr. Kim said, serve it over a cooked piece of meat, fish or vegetable, with rice on the side.
Danny Bowien, the chef and owner of Mission Chinese Food in New York and San Francisco, said such combinations were central to the home cooking he does for his wife and son.
At Mr. Bowien's restaurant in New York, the oyster sauce is made by Angela Dimayuga, the executive chef, out of smoked oysters and a blend of soy sauces. If it were available for retail sale, some would drink it like Champagne.
But it is not, and so Mr. Bowien turned by way of example to commercially available fish sauce instead. "You can have a piece of cooked meat that's, like, just O.K.," he said. "Melt down some light brown sugar in the pan juices and hit it with the fish sauce and a lot of black pepper. That, over some supermarket salmon, is crazy delicious — with warm rice. And if you add a handful of fresh mint? Or basil? That goes a really long way."
The rice is as important as the herbs, Mr. Bowien added. Make a lot of it so there is always some around for later meals. Cooking rice on a Monday, after all, makes a Wednesday night stir-fry approximately seven times easier to pull off.
Mr. Kim offered guidance. "If you put rice in a zip-lock bag, warm, then put it in the fridge," he said, "you can microwave it for a minute a few days later and it's like you made it an hour ago." For stir-fries, he added, let the rice come to room temperature before bagging it. "Then put it in the freezer where it'll dry out a little," he said. To cook, "zap the frozen rice in the microwave for 15 seconds so it's easier to break up, wipe your hands with a neutral oil and flake the rice into a bowl so it's not clumpy."
The resulting dish may not be in any way "authentic" to the cuisines of Asia's vast plains, mountains and coastlines. "In fact, it'll be totally American," Mr. Talde said. "Salty, spicy, sweet, acidic, with a ton of flavor."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/dining/miso-soy-sauce-asian-ingredients-for-weeknight-cooking.html
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