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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, February 19, 2003

A few artful blends lead to variety of sauces

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Shoyus from such companies as Kikkoman are made with soy beans and brewed naturally. These sauces are preferred in Japan over synthetically produced sauces often found in the United States.

Associated Press file photo • Oct. 19, 1999

Shoyu is central to Japanese cooking — a member of the holy quartet of sauce-making (dashi, shoyu, mirin, sake) and one of the five traditional flavors (shoyu, salt, sugar, vinegar, hot spices). It is prized for enhancing and marrying with flavors rather than merely masking them.

Japanese chefs use a trick that can be helpful to home cooks, too: formulas that allow them to create a variety of different sauces from the same ingredients — dashi, shoyu, mirin, sake, in that order. Dashi is the basic Japanese broth, made with katsuobushi — bonito flakes — and kombu — seaweed. It is the heart and soul of Japanese cooking; though mixes are widely used, the best dashi is made from scratch, said chef Hiroshi Fukui of L'Uraku Restaurant.

Fukui uses these base recipes for making tempura dipping sauce, broth for nabemono (quick-cooked stews) and other sauces and dishes.

Tempura

For tempura, the formula is: 4/1/1. Meaning: 4 parts dashi, one part shoyu, one part mirin. The "part" can be a teaspoon, a tablespoon, a cup or a quart, depending on how much sauce you need to make — the important thing is the proportion. The shoyu used is the standard medium-dark sauce.

For nabemono or "pot" dishes, it's 11/1/1/1/: 11 parts dashi (yes, eleven parts), one part shoyu, one part mirin, one part sake. This is a more subtly flavored sauce, and the shoyu chosen might be light or dark, depending on the desired color and flavor.

Marinades

Chef Grant Sato of Kapi'olani Community College uses a formula, too, for making island-style marinades that illustrates the difference between Japanese and island Asian cooking.

Grant's formula is 1/1/1 shoyu, sugar and water, or fruit juice (such as pineapple juice for a sweet-sour type teriyaki sauce). The three are stirred together in a saucepan, heated until the sugar melts and then cooled for use as a marinade.

But Fukui said the approach he was taught in Japan is different: There, the teriyaki sauce formula was 1/1 mirin and sake; the two would be quickly cooked together to burn off the alcohol, then 1/1 sugar and shoyu would be added and the sauce slowly reduced, stirring occasionally, until it attains a glossy sheen — 30 minutes or longer, depending on how much sauce you are making. This creates a "mother sauce" to which flavoring ingredients such as ginger or garlic might be added, but those flavoring agents were never added during the initial cooking.

Differences to notice are sweetness (in the Islands, folks tend to prefer a sweeter flavor) and the care and attention to appearance (Japanese would appreciate such subtleties as the sauce's sheen).

Here are a few shoyu-based sauces to try, based on recipes in the new "Essentials of Asian Cuisine" by Corrine Trang and Christopher Hirsheimer (Simon & Schuster, hardback, $40). This is an interesting and up-to-date book that offers a pan-Asian approach with recipes from Japan, China and Southeast Asia, making it very easy to compare and contrast approaches to similar dishes.

Ponzu and other sauces

Homemade ponzu sauce: 1/1/1, lime juice, soy sauce, dashi.

Sour sauce for dipping snacks such as shumai: 5 tablespoons soy sauce, 3 tablespoons rice vinegar.

Cold sauce for soba noodles: 2 cups dashi, 1 cup soy sauce, 1 cup mirin, 1 1/2 cups sugar. Heat together, chill and toss with cold soba.

Yakitori no tare (sweet yakitori sauce): 1 1/2 cup shoyu, 1/4 cup tamari, 1/2 cup mirin, 1 cup sake, 1/3 cup sugar. Heat together until sugar dissolves; cool to room temperature. Use to baste skewers of chicken, meats or vegetables. Serve sprinkled with shichimi (seven spice mixture).

This more complex home ponzu recipe is said to more closely resemble the authentic stuff, although chef Fukui says the correct flavor can only be achieved with various forms of Asian citrus not routinely available here.

Homemade ponzu II: Combine together juice of 4 lemons, 1/2 cup seasoned rice vinegar (sushi-zu), 1 1/4 cups shoyu, 1/4 cup tamari, 1/2 cup mirin, 1/3 cup katsuoboshi (bonito flakes), 6-inch square of kombu (seaweed) cut into 6 pieces. Allow to marinate overnight. Strain and place in airtight jar. Will last for six months in refrigerator.