January journal: adding sweeteners

[ursula]

thistleingrey asked me to post about "Added sweeteners in cooking," with the note, "However you prefer. (Not recs unless that's what you'd prefer; I tend not to make food be very sweet.)"

Sweeteners show up in my savory cooking in two ways: in recipes where the sweetener is integral, or when I'm trying to adjust a dish's taste. For an example of the former, consider the Pok Pok tuna salad, which is a recipe I use a lot as a template. In practice, I would use two cans of tuna and whatever crunchy vegetable I can find (often slivers of daikon and carrot--in the late fall, sometimes glasseye sings, "This is the dawning of the Age of the Daikon"!) Sometimes I double the dressing and sometimes I don't, but I always make adjustments based on the contents of my pantry; this isn't a special-shopping-trip recipe. Thus, my version of the Pok Pok tuna salad dressing actually goes:

Combine in a small pot:

2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon brown sugar or palm sugar
A one- to two-inch chunk of peeled ginger, cut into long thin strips
About three cloves of garlic, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced, or minced
A dessert-spoon of sambal oelek

Heat very briefly on a low flame, agitating slightly, until the sugar dissolves.

If you analyze how this recipe works, it contains salty liquid (fish sauce), sour liquid (lime juice), intense aromatics (ginger and garlic), and something hot (chiles or sambal oelek). The brief heat mellows those ingredients very slightly, but on their own they would still be extremely aggressive: the sugar soothes your tongue enough to taste the actual flavors.

When I'm adding sugar (or honey, or mirin) that wasn't in a recipe, it's usually to address the following specific problem. When you cook something acidic, such as canned tomatoes or a sauce with vinegar, long enough, it stops tasting sour and starts tasting rich. For example, I used to make the winter and spring curries out of Fields of Greens very frequently. These include a step where you simmer tomatoes with ginger, water, and spices by themselves, to induce this specific effect: that's the kind of process you come up with if you own an outstanding restaurant and want to cook at scale and with control. But if you're cooking at home in your own kitchen and are optimizing on variables like "counter space" and "number of pots to wash later", you probably want to cook some vegetables or meat in your acidic sauce. And sometimes you just get the timing wrong, and hit a stage where the texture of whatever you're simmering is right, but the sauce still tastes sour. That's the moment you add a spoonful of sweetener and simmer it in for a couple of minutes--at a teaspoon or so of sugar, the sweetness should be nearly invisible, but the sauce will no longer be sharp.

Comments

[kaberett]

Yes! Sugar-in-tomato-sauce is A Standard of some of my homefoods.

[glasseye]

"This is the dawning of the Age of Daikon Radish!"

[thistleingrey]

Thanks! This is useful input for thought (trying and failing to avoid "food for thought"). I pretty much never put sugar into things that aren't sweet(ish) baking--will need to experiment a bit. I think the last savory thing I sweetened is azuki bean, and then it was a tiny amount of brown sugar against a similarly small amount of salt, to balance the beans' inherent flavor.