Sauces with an Asian Accent

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.

The Asian-sauce paradoxIf you were hoping for an exhaustive accounting of Asian sauces — a catalog of each one’s ingredients, uses and origin — you’ll find no such inventory here. You may not find one anywhere, because you can’t quantify or qualify infinity. And the number of Asian sauces is infinite. Like the mental labyrinth of a Zen Buddhist koan, Asian culture delights in paradox, and its sauces are no exception: The wider they range and the more their numbers swell, the more manageable an understanding of them becomes. According to Sandy Rust, kitchen manager, Yan Can Cook, Inc., San Francisco, “When you ask yourself, ‘Wait: Are these sauces something any old nerd can prepare?’ you find out that the answer is yes. They’re very quick and they’re very easy.”

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.

Re-Orienting yourselfIt’s on everything from T-shirts to tattoos: The symbol of yin and yang that represents the two invisible forces that, by opposing each other, keep nature in balance. Yin embodies the softer side of things, cast as the yielding, “feminine” force that runs cool and wet in the natural world. Yang, in contrast, is feverish and “masculine” — as hot, dry and in-your-face as a sandy wind blowing in from the Gobi Desert.

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.”

Peeling back the layersChef Eric Carré, founder of ErdaTek, Inc., Wheeling, IL, believes there’s more to Asian-sauce mastery than keeping things in balance. Tempering a traditional, Paris-bred culinary education with a passion for Asian cuisines cultivated while working in Malaysia, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Hong Kong, he brings a bit of both worlds to his understanding of sauces.

“The big thing behind Asian cooking from India to China to Japan is that if you were to take a stir-fried dish, for example, and evaluate it as you’re eating it, there is a different texture, a different color and a different flavor scattered through it in layers. The contrary, when we talk about European food, would be a boeuf bourguignon, where everything is cooked in the same pot, the carrots are tender, the beef is tender and the sauce is spread over it all. That’s not to say that it’s not good, but it is a very different example of a cuisine that’s more monochromatic,” explains Carré. “But when you eat something like Vietnamese lemongrass chicken, it doesn’t just taste like cooked chicken with lemongrass flavor. There’s a textural difference in the stir-fried elements, crunchiness from nuts that the cook might add and flavor from the lemongrass, and it’s very layered. You get peaks and lows of flavors and textures.”

This layering of peaks and lows, he says, is the benchmark of any good sauce, whether a bordelaise or a standard soy. But how you lay them down makes all the difference. By building sauces out of a variety of ingredients — some already prepared, such as hoisin and oyster sauce or sesame paste and rice vinegar; others fresh, including herbs, garlic, ginger and greenmarket staples — Asian cooks construct an endless battery of sauces with kaleidoscopic sensory layers.

Recalling some of her success with the layering approach, Rust says: “I remember a steamed whole fish we made in the test kitchen a while back. We scored the sides of the fish and we laced those pockets with garlic, and then we steamed it. When it came out of the steamer, we took some julienned ginger, green onions and fresh garlic, and poured them over the top. Then we took some oil (a preserved element) and heated it over a flame until it just started to smoke, and then we poured that on top of the fish, too. That’s a very good example of how you can build a well-rounded sauce out of preserved elements and elements that are fresh, like the herbs and garlic. And that’s a classic Asian finish for steamed fish.”

In fact, by building sauces layer by layer, Asian cuisine parallels the French tradition of transforming a basic mother, or leading, sauce into a small, or composed, sauce through the addition of seasonings, herbs and other flavor adjuncts. But, whereas an old saw tells us that a proper French sauce should be “as constant as the morning star, no matter who prepares it,” Asian cooks transform their leading sauces into composed sauces according to their own dictates of taste, culture and common sense. “That is the essence of Asian cooking,” Rust emphasizes, “and it’s not based on tablespoons or teaspoons, but on whatever suits your palate.”

Asia’s sauce-building approach differs from Europe’s most markedly in the nature of the base. Western sauces start with a basic reduced stock, or demi-glace, as a foundation. The foundations of many Asian sauces, however, are often other premade sauces found in jars and bottles located on those imposing Asian supermarket shelves. It is important to note, though, that a prepared sauce in the Asian context is meant more as a prepared seasoning ingredient that cooks use to flesh out a complex sauce, rather than as the finished sauce itself.

“Those prepared ingredients have a pungent flavor that’s a result of fermentation,” Carré says. “Asian cooks are very much into fermentation and dehydration — preserving ingredients in order to obtain a very specific flavor profile.” Fermentation, while protecting ingredients from Asia’s subtropical climate and scanty refrigeration, serves the same purpose as the stock reductions of the Western process: It extracts elemental notes from the ingredients, concentrating them into a potent liquid flavor-delivery package. He says that because fermentation has already done the work of distilling the ingredients’ essence, when constructing sauces using these prepared ingredients, they don’t require much cooking since they’re already strong in flavor. So, even unskilled cooks can whip up a respectable Asian sauce in no time. (As for those pesky roux, Asian cooks sidestep the matter by thickening sauces with a simple corn starch and water slurry added during the last moments of cooking.)

“On the market, there is a huge number of these prepared sauces,” Carré admits. “It can be overwhelming, walking into an Asian grocery store. But when you really evaluate the selection, knowing what are the basic ingredients and which ones you should have in your kitchen, there aren’t that many essentials.”

The salt of AsiaWhen it comes to Asian cooking, however, the two biggest essentials are fish sauce and its agrarian cousin, soy sauce. Records dating back some 1,500 years to China’s Zhou dynasty relate the common practice of “putting up” fresh seafood for the winter in a liberal packing of salt. Months later, when folks retrieved their catch, the fish had fermented and partially decomposed, leaving a pool of dark liquid at the base of the storage vessels. Somehow — perhaps on a dare, perhaps by lucky accident — someone tasted this exudate and found, to his likely surprise, that it wasn’t half-bad; pungent, to be sure, but salty, savory and often more appetizing than the fish from whence it came. Soon enough, word of the liquid gold spread and, eventually, wherever there was fish, there were people willing to harvest fish sauce.

The seasoning took particular hold in what are now the nations of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines. But as Buddhism’s influence in China and Japan turned the dietary tide toward vegetarianism, strict practitioners required a vegetable alternative to the habit-forming sauce. Plentiful grains such as soybeans and wheat made an obvious choice, and enterprising vegetarians discovered that salting and fermenting them also yielded a savory discharge that, while different from the fishy potion, equaled its seasoning efficacy.

Today, fish sauce and soy sauce remain ubiquitous in Asia, where they’re likened to “liquid salt.” Both products’ creation has changed surprisingly little over the years, too. In the case of soy sauce, its traditional production proceeds via fermentation — also known as natural brewing — whereby manufacturers inoculate a blend of soybeans and wheat with a seed mold of Aspergillus oryzae or Aspergillus soyae. After letting this mature for three days, they mix the resulting mash (called a koji) with a salted brine solution to form a moromi. Saccharomyces rouxii yeast and lactic-acid bacteria ferment the moromi until it matures (usually from three to 12 months), at which point manufacturers press it to yield raw soy sauce ready for refining, heat-treatment and packaging.

Meanwhile, manufacturers gather the salty, savory paste that’s left over, calling it miso. “It’s a whole different animal, really,” says Caterine Pantsios, food center manager, Ketchum Public Relations, San Francisco. “Miso, I think even more than soy sauce, has such a broad range — from a really delicate white miso that’s got a very smooth texture, to these chunky, hearty, salty misos.” Miso pastes made from rice and barley, as well as from soybeans, widen the organoleptic palette even further. “Their uses are different, too,” Pantsios adds. “Of course, there’s miso soup, but it tends to go into sauces and dressings, as well, in smaller amounts, proportionally, than soy sauce.” When a hot hibachi griddle kisses a subtle swash of miso on a fillet of black cod, the glaze caramelizes to an irresistibly sweet crackle.

Much like wine, soy sauce and miso paste emerge from the chrysalis of fermentation as unrecognizable from their raw materials as a butterfly is from a caterpillar. “During the prolonged fermentation period,” says Matt Hutchinson, manager, research and development, Kikkoman marketing and planning, Elgin, IL, “the various microorganisms and their hydrolases significantly alter the character of the product. Nearly 300 aromatic compounds have been identified in naturally brewed soy sauce. In addition, the proteins and starches are broken down into amino acids, sugars and alcohols. All these breakdown products, along with the salt, provide a very balanced taste profile and pleasing aroma that improve the quality of a large variety of food — from meat, poultry and seafood to vegetables, rice, pasta, and most sauces.”

Most Chinese soy sauces are made exclusively from soybeans, according to Hutchinson, but Japanese varieties combine the legume with wheat to provide a more pleasing, balanced flavor and aroma. The Japanese call this blended sauce shoyu; the wheat-free kind is tamari. And while the ingredient statement on most bottles of naturally brewed soy sauce reads with the graceful brevity of haiku — wheat, soybeans, water, salt — headier potions, such as Indonesia’s sweet and syrupy kecap manis, contain corn starch thickeners, palm sugar, and seasonings such as star anise.

According to Hutchinson, the ideal soy sauce “should have a pleasant, complex, brewed aroma, much like a wine; it should have a balanced taste that’s predominantly salty, but also evocative of sweetness, sour, salty, bitter and umami flavors; it should have a meaty, brothy taste; and it should be free of harsh, chemical off-notes and burnt flavors.” Those criteria apply to naturally brewed soy sauce, but not all varieties arrive on the shelf via that route. Treating the soybeans with proteolytic chemicals also hydrolyzes their proteins and starches, liberating aromatic flavor compounds. But experts say that the chemical process’s result is far inferior to the rich, full-bodied complexity that comes from natural brewing.

As for fish-sauce production, Dan Goral, product manager, Sokol and Company, Countryside, IL, explains that immediately after fisherman haul in their catch of long-jaw anchovy — the small, thin, almost translucent saltwater fish used to make the seasoning — they treat them with salt. “That’s the key to it, because otherwise, in the tropical temperatures, if you wait 12 hours, your fish will be turning by the time you salt them,” he says. “Manufacturers who produce a really high-quality fish sauce will tell you that they ‘kill the fish with salt.’” He adds that every Southeast Asian household traditionally had a clay pot of salted fish steeping away day and night, giving the fish’s proteins time to slowly decompose with the help of naturally occurring enzymes in the fish flesh. “But when you get into industrial-scale production,” he continues, “the Thais use large concrete extraction pits that are maybe 10,000 liters each. In Vietnam, they use these large wooden vats that are made out of teak and mahogany. They’re really beautiful.” There, the salted fish wait from nine months to a year for all their proteins to dissolve into a clear brown liquid filled with savory amino acids.

Those in the know judge fish-sauce quality on a variety of measures — there should be no off- or oxidized flavors or aromas, and the sauce should be amber-colored and clear, without any cloudy residue — all of which reflect the extent of protein breakdown and extraction. Since the warmer the fermentation, the more quickly the fermentation process proceeds, Goral explains that it’s the Vietnamese, with their large, wooden vats, who can get the highest protein content from their lean, warm water fish sauce “because these big vats are, for one, kept above ground, which means that they’re in this balmy, equatorial environment where it’s always 35° to 40°C, and because these big drums breathe. It’s just like when fermenting wine, a stainless-steel vat versus a barrel. The stainless steel is akin to a lined concrete pit in that it doesn’t breathe.”

Objective rating of fish sauces employs a metric known as the degree number. “That degree number is something that really never, ever comes across on a bottle,” notes Goral, “but, in terms of industrial applications, it’s the way that fish-sauce manufacturers specify protein content.” Specifically, the degree number notes the grams of total nitrogen (liberated from proteins) per liter of fish sauce. Degree measures of 20 and 40 are common, with the higher-degree sauces darker in color and more potently flavored. So, for use in something like a dipping sauce that goes right from the bowl to the palate, a milder 20-degree sauce would suffice to give an umami kick without being bracing.

“Now, if you’re doing prepared foods, like a frozen rice bowl, then you want the higher-degree fish sauces,” Goral says, partly because the sauce must compete with other ingredients for the tongue’s attention, and also because “if you look at overall salt levels, a 20-degree fish sauce has the same amount of salt as a 40-degree fish sauce.” So, with a 40-degree sauce, you get more umami and more protein extraction with a proportionally lower salt concentration — handy when the rest of the formula already has enough salt.

“Umami is all about protein. It’s all about protein satisfaction,” Goral says. And it’s at the core of the appeal of both fish sauce and soy sauce. Whether or not this fifth taste (whose name translates roughly from the Japanese as “delicious”) deserves that title kept sensory-science symposia lively with debate for years. But molecular biologists recently identified a taste receptor sensitive to the amino acid glutamate — a prime player in evoking umami — lending credence to its legitimacy as a real, live taste.

Anyone familiar with Asian sauces, however, doesn’t need the technical confirmation. They already know the delicious flavor that fish sauce and soy sauce bring to dips, glazes, dressings and condiments. “Undeniably, the most-popular sauce made with soy sauce is teriyaki,” notes Kunitomo Kizu, general manager at Kikkoman marketing and planning. Made with soy sauce, a sweetener (anything from sugar or high fructose corn syrup to brown sugar or honey), a vinegar- or fruit-based acid (pineapple juice is the standard in Hawaii) and some type of alcohol (traditionally the sweet Japanese rice wine, mirin), this favorite with American taste buds lends a shiny glaze and sweet smokiness to grilled and broiled items. He cites ponzu sauce, made from soy sauce and citrus juice, as another candidate for stateside appreciation. Other Japanese sauces derived from soy sauce include tsuyu, similar to soup stock in Asian cooking but based on soy sauce; the tempura dipping sauces made from a mixture of soy sauce, sugar and the dried fish flakes called bonito; and sukiyaki sauce, made from a mixture of soy sauce, sugar and sake for creating easy, one-dish meals.

Of course, plenty of Asian sauces — chile sauces, such as Indonesia’s sambal olek and Thailand’s nam prik; Chinese plum sauces; Indian chutneys; and South Asian curry sauces made with dried spice blends — aren’t based on soy or fish sauce. But while they harmoniously combine flavors their own way, there’s no denying that whenever fish and soy sauce appear, they help keep a composition in balance. Kizu praises the way these Asian foundations “pull the flavors together, filling in for missing notes or tastes. Foods become more balanced and blended. They taste brighter and fresher. All the flavors of the foods are enhanced without losing their own character.”

Now you’re cookingIn pursuit of balance, Asian cooks have effected a repurposing of the sauce that runs counter to its traditional role in the West as a fluid blanket draped over, or laid under, a meat cutlet, vegetable assortment or portion of starch. An orthodox French chef would blanch at the idea of dipping a french fry into a bowl of velouté or sprinkling a little bordelaise on a bland bite of burger. In Europe, the marriage of sauce to substrate is a meticulously arranged affair, fraught with as many taboos and codes of propriety as a caste system. Rust says European sauces are always pointed toward a specific dish, with darker sauces courting the darker meats while lighter versions remain with chicken and fish. What’s more, like a bride and groom on their wedding night, the classic European sauce rarely even touches its betrothed until the two meet on the serving plate.

Conversely, in Asia’s kitchens, cooks celebrate the open marriage. Got a bottle of black-bean garlic sauce? Go ahead and swing with it. “I love that stuff on everything,” Rust says, although she’s particularly fond of what it does for salmon. “All you do is take your salmon steak, throw it in a wok with a little oil and when it’s toasty on one side, flip it over to the other side. When it’s just about cooked through, you glaze on some soy sauce and black-bean garlic sauce, and then you flip it back over so the black-bean garlic sauce hits the heat and caramelizes,” she continues. “And is that gonna be good.” Black-bean garlic sauce gets along equally well with steamed crab, stir-fried vegetables or as the secret weapon in Chor’s Italian spaghetti sauce, where she says it brightens the spaghetti sauce in a nontraditional way. Although you won’t notice it in there, Chor promises that you’d miss it if it weren’t.

Asian sauces perk up dishes at the table as effectively as they build flavors during preparation. “Go to an Asian-noodle restaurant — Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, any of them — and you find spinning trays at each table, and they’ve all got the different sauces on them,” says Yan. “You’ve got at least two different kinds of chile sauce; vinegar with chile; vinegar with sugar; chile oil; fish sauce; soy sauce. And you’ve got hoisin and plum-sauce dips for egg rolls and fried appetizers, and there will always be some Chinese hot mustard there, too. Then there are the sauces that you spread on mu shu pancakes. All of these are legitimate Asian sauces, and yet they’re condiments at the same time, and they all play different roles in every part of the dining and cooking process.”

By using Asian sauces as table condiments, the individual gets to season and flavor his meal as he sees fit. Rust claims that she can predict the tenor of her meal based on the selection of saucy condiments available at the table alone. “If there’s an outstanding chile-garlic sauce,” she says, “it’s going to make a meal with a real zap. If they’ve got a really good-quality vinegar, I know I’m going to enjoy some authentic dim sum — because that’s what they do in Asia: They put vinegar on their dim sum. They’re not necessarily going to dip it in the soy sauce the way Westerners do,” although it’s a safe bet soy sauce is on the table, too. “These Asian sauces, however you use them, by balancing yin and yang, actually enhance, change and round out the flavor of any dish,” she concludes.

Asian sauces assumed this jack-of-all-trades role, in part, in the service of layering flavors. As Carré explains: “If you stir-fry a chicken with a certain cooking sauce, you’re building one layer of very-specific flavor and texture character. If you’re eventually going to serve it with a rich and salty dipping sauce, as soon as you mix those two together, it’s going to give you a very different flavor perception.” He adds that layering the chicken’s natural meatiness with the depth of its cooking sauce and a mouth-watering salty dip creates a wonderful flavor that will keep changing with each bite.

So, if you’ve got an unfamiliar sauce, how do you know whether it’s a base, a dip, a condiment, a glaze or a cooking sauce? “You don’t have to know. That’s the beauty of it. It can wear whatever hat you give it,” Rust says. “Black-bean garlic sauce can work amazingly well as a dip when it’s mixed with a little vinegar. Then you could take the same sauce, put it into a wok over heat with some vegetables and shrimp, and it’s going to round out and salt the dish for you. It’s the same sauce, but just used every way imaginable. It’s all in how you accompany it. So trying to categorize it — trying to say that these sauces are ‘A’ and those ones are ‘B’ — that just doesn’t work with this cuisine. Therein lies the difference.”

Know your rootsWhile years of preparing and savoring Asian cuisines have nourished Rust’s intimate understanding of them, product developers still hesitating on the region’s culinary borders will have to do without such well-honed instincts. Carré suggests that novices approach Asian sauces with mingled curiosity and cautious respect. He thinks the best way to make that approach is through the side door of culture. “We have all these wonderful sauces and ingredients being imported into the U.S. and then, overnight, a chef finds himself expected to be an expert Asian chef,” he says. “But when he starts to use all those flavors, the outcome, a lot of times, is not very successful. So I make the point that any chef who’d like to understand those flavors has to understand the culture behind them, and the reasons why those sauces are used as they are in Asia. When you understand that, then you can do your own interpretation.”

Take soy sauce, which varies from country to country. “Whether you are in Vietnam, Japan or China,” Carré continues, “you will have a very different flavor profile of soy sauce. So when we do product development for airlines with routes in Asia and they ask us to make authentic Japanese meals and authentic Chinese meals, I know to use a much-lighter-flavored soy sauce that is more appropriate for the Japanese market when I’m going after a Japanese-meal concept. You cannot just say, ‘Well, I’m going to do an Asian dinner,’ because that’s too vague. You have to define what country you are after so you can define the ingredients and flavors to use.”

Understanding why Asian cuisines blend and balance certain sauce elements may also require an intuition that comes only with experience. Nuoc cham, an all-purpose Vietnamese dip, contains fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, and perhaps some garlic, chile flakes and vinegar. “But the reason they add the sugar,” Carré explains, “is not just to make it sweet, but because the sugar reduces the fishy flavor of the fish sauce.” Same thing with the lime juice and vinegar. He adds that if a chef makes his own version with just fish sauce and soy sauce, or some other ingredient that isn’t complementary, the result is aesthetic disaster.

As a result, Carré always starts product development with an established recipe, following it to the letter at least once in order to, as he says, “understand the message. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Western or Eastern dish. We always want to understand exactly what we’re working with and the different flavor backgrounds we face.” He laments that too many chefs “jump too fast and suddenly create an Americanized version of what we feel the product should taste like.” Thus, shelves fill with products whose names have nothing to do with the real intent of the dish — the original principles that inspired it — and consumers are misled as to what Sichuan chicken or kung pao shrimp really means.

It’s not that Carré is opposed to adapting Asian principles to Western palates. After all, he knows that Americans are reluctant to take a chance on something such as green-papaya salad with fish-sauce dressing. If we want to get consumers to discover Asian sauces and condiments, we may have to hold their hands, introducing them to new ingredients via recognizable foods and in small doses. Hence, mu shu pizza with Chinese sausage, green onions and hoisin sauce; mashed potatoes with wasabi-cream gravy; and grilled chicken in a Thai-style green curry marinade. But, he says, “This is a step you take after you’ve already gained an understanding of the ingredients and the cultures behind them.”

Yan agrees: “If you have a basic understanding of the root and foundation of these sauces, you can create truly successful fusion dishes. We were just talking here in the test kitchen about how you want to create a dish that’s a masterpiece of fusion, not confusion.” Confucius couldn’t have said it better himself.

Kimberly Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a bachelor’s degree in consumer food science with a minor in English from the University of California-Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and enjoys cooking and eating food in addition to writing about it.