No intro! Here it is...
1 cup Water
2 Tbsp Soy sauce
2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp Sesame oil
2 shots Tabasco sauce
1 tsp Hoisin sauce
2 Scallions, finely chopped
1-2 cloves Garlic, minced
In a small saucepan, add liquid ingredients and bring to the boil. Slice the scallions as thinly as you possibly can. Crush the garlic with either the flat side of a knife or pound it once with your fist, depending on how much like a caveman you feel today. Once the garlic is crushed, use a large butcher knife to mince it. This size knife is recommended because you can put your other hand on the top of the blade to guide it. Ever seen Jacques Pépin mince garlic? That's kinda what we're going for.
Once the liquids come to the boil, add the alliums. Stir in the Hoisin sauce. Its natural tendency is to stick to the spoon, so you can use that spoon to stir the aromatics into the sauce in order to get all the Hoisin off into the pot. Boil sauce until reduced by a third. Remove from heat and spoon over rice, sliced meats, or fish; or stir in cooked noodles.
Now, for the intro.
I always hate how recipes begin with a 5 paragraph essay. Like, I don't care how 9/11 personally affected your career as a podiatrist, I just ordered up a recipe for poultry seasoning and I got you. Knowing the state of the modern search engine, it'll probably fuck up and assume this in/outro is at the top of the page and show it before the recipe, if it bothers indexing this page at all.
Anyway, this recipe wasn't really my own invention. People living on the Pacific Rim have been making this condiment for at least 100 years, I just clean-roomed it by accident when I was searching for a way to add excitement to some very uninteresting faux-beef nuggets yesterday, without using powdered soup base. That tends to be the basis of most of my sauces, but I haven't been able to get it since Orrington Farms quit making their vegetable base several months ago. I've been watching Steven Raichlen's Project Fire quite a lot lately, and I realised that Steven hardly ever uses stock in his sauces, preferring instead to use flavourful, aromatic ingredients and boil them in water or vinegar to make reductions. So, I decided to use that same idea and make this sauce. I don't need to tell you that it's one of the best sauces I've ever made. It livened those boring little soy sponges right up and added immense depth to an ordinary pot of rice. Plus, when you boil the garlic, you can't ever burn it so you don't run the risk of having garlic breath, even with the relatively large chunks of garlic in this sauce. It's also impossible to overcook garlic by boiling it; you can boil it until the liquid evapourates and it won't affect the flavour.
Obviously, don't boil it until the liquid evapourates. You don't want to have to clean a pot that's boiled dry. Plus, you wouldn't have any sauce left.
--5 May 2023--