[Sca-cooks] Maybe OOP - Chinese Brown Sauce

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Craig Jones:
>Alright... While you're there Mr. Smarty Pants...
>
>I doing the Broiled Chicken recipe for ASFTQ this weekend.  It uses
>'bean sauce'.  What would you use there?

Probably [warning: Mandarin alert, and I don't even pretend to try to 
speak it] Yuan Shai Chi (whole brown bean paste -- brown bean paste 
with whole beans) or Mo Yuan Chi (same thing, only ground up, 
homogeneous brown bean paste). The Cantonese name would be more like 
Men See.

There's also a rather remote (to my mind) possibility that it could 
also be something akin to red bean curd cheese (this started life as 
bean curd, drained, cut into cubes, and fermented in a brine until it 
starts to break down to a sort of Camembert consistency and flavor). 
I forget what the red kind is called, but the Cantonese call the 
white kind Foo Yi or Foo Ngoy. It gets confusing because you can get 
the white foo ngoy bean paste with chili flakes or without, but even 
with the red chili flakes, it's still white bean curd cheese -- red 
bean curd cheese has some kind of red mold culture added to it, I 
think, that makes it a rather deep, brick red. I mention this because 
they do figure in roast and barbecued meats. Southerners tend to 
prefer the white stuff over the red.

On the other hand, given that ASFTQ gives a recipe for soy sauce that 
produces an end result very much like brown bean paste, we can be 
reasonably sure it's a flavor Yuan Dynasty people would have been 
familiar with, and it does go well with meats of all kinds. I'd go 
with brown bean paste until someone showed me the error of my ways...

>Drakey - off to Rowany Festival this weekend, and a campsite of
>pseudo-mongols.
>
>Ps.  My Mung Bean Wine came out great.  Much better than expected.  Like
>a strong traditional gruit Ale with a fruit back taste (from the Musk
>Melon) and quite hot/peppery from the Smartweed.  Very interesting
>indeed...

Very, very cool! Maybe you'd be willing to send your adapted recipe 
with quantities, either to the list or privately? It sounds like 
something I should bring to my friend Ateno's house... he's had 
several years to recover from our various Ox bone wine debacles...

Adamantius


-- 




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