[Sca-cooks] Maybe OOP - Chinese Brown Sauce

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Lonnie D. Harvel:
>Greetings All!
>
>Quite often, dishes I have in Chinese restaurants have something 
>referred to as "brown sauce".  Usually, I can duplicate things I 
>like, but for many years this one has eluded me. My attempts haven't 
>worked and the recipes that I have found online and in books do not 
>come out the same either. So, do any of you have a favorite or 
>recommended recipe/method for brown sauce?

It can be any of several basic types, but I'd say one of the most 
common is a mixture of light and dark soy sauces, some water, and a 
thickener (probably with a good dollop of msg in some restaurants). 
Northern Chinese dishes sometimes use dark soy and some brown bean 
paste, and perhaps a pinch of sugar. Real Southerners use a lot of 
oyster sauce, maybe a couple of tablespoons, with a teaspoon or so of 
cornstarch, some white pepper, and enough water to make almost a pint.

Oyster sauce gravy (see above) with some tomato ketchup is an 
old-timey Cantonese restaurant sauce for steak.

The only one I absolutely can't figure out is the mysterious brown 
goo some restaurants and take-out places put on egg foo young (we 
just drizzle oyster sauce or dark soy out of the bottle at home; it's 
much better). The commercial stuff is sometimes just thickened and 
diluted soy sauce, but sometimes it's this very weird stuff that 
almost seems like dark brown roux with just a little soy sauce, some 
water, possibly with some more thickener (depending on the darkness 
of the roux), maybe some combination of msg, sugar, and white pepper. 
It's just weird stuff and I've never seen it anywhere else but on 
commercial egg foo young of dubious quality...

Adamantius
-- 




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Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

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