[Sca-cooks] Cooking steaks was Re: lethal drinks

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Wed Jul 23 07:42:33 PDT 2008


On Jul 23, 2008, at 10:25 AM, Beth Ann Bretter wrote:

>> And honestly, some of the soy sauce out there that people
>> are using
>> for this purpose is pretty unspeakable, too ;-).
>
> Well, you can rest assured that I buy the good dark stuff from the  
> Asian market down the street.  I tend to stand there tilting bottles  
> so I can choose the one that best clings to the glass.

You might like Indonesian ketjap manis, which is a thick, sweet, dark  
soy. I've come to appreciate lighter soys after trying a lot of  
brands, and coming to the conclusion that the good ones are not in  
fact just a salt solution, but have a distinctly wine-like profile.

But my favorite soy-based table condiment is dark soy that has  
previously been used for red-cooking meats, with things like star  
anise and ginger added to the pot. There used to be a little hole-in- 
the-wall tea-and-bun shop, nothing so glorified as a dim sum house,  
called May Flower on Mott Street in New York's Chinatown, that had  
little cruets of this "used" sauce on the tables. (The shop is still  
there, but I haven't been in for years, after they started putting up  
signs in the window in German and there was always a tour bus parked  
in front of the place... I hear it is terrible now.)

> You can also rest assured that my white rice eating days are, for  
> all intents and purposes, over so my barbarism is for the most part  
> leashed.
>
> However, if I do ever get to eat white rice again I will try it  
> Phlip's way because that sounds yummy.


It is. But it's even better on the fried fish (think tempura with  
ponzu sauce, which is basically what Phlip is speaking of, saucewise),  
which you can still taste under it.

Adamantius




"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter




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