Vol. XXII · Stocks, Soups and Sauces Plate 10 of 11cold sauces, dressings, dipping sauce, 蘸料, 调味汁, dumpling sauce, salsa, pesto, chimichurri, vinaigrette, balance, soy sauce, black vinegar, 糖醋F

Cold Sauces and Dressings.

Neat soy sauce on a dumpling is just salty. Add black vinegar, a pinch of sugar and a little water, and the dumpling tastes of itself, only more.

Cold sauces are uncooked, so they depend entirely on fresh ingredients and balance (XI.11). Salsas and chimichurri are chopped herbs, chilli, onion and acid; pestos are herbs, nuts, cheese and oil pounded into a paste (basil browns by its enzymes once bruised, VIII.6, so pesto is made close to serving or blanched first); vinaigrettes are oil and acid emulsified briefly (X.3). Chinese 调味汁 and 蘸料 — the soy, vinegar, garlic, chilli oil and sesame mixtures for dumplings, cold dishes and hot pot — are built to a ratio for each dish: 糖醋 for sweet-and-sour, 鱼香 for fish-fragrant, 怪味 for "strange flavour" with everything at once.

A dipping sauce is a special case: it is tasted on the food, where it makes up a small share of each bite, so it must be strong enough to season that bite and balanced in that dilution. Neat soy sauce on a dumpling adds only salt and umami; black vinegar adds the sour that lifts the richness of the filling (XI.4), a little sugar rounds the vinegar, and a little water keeps the salt from dominating. The workshop balances a dumpling dip.

Below: the five tastes of a bite of pork dumpling carrying 15 % of its weight in the dipping sauce you mix (perceive model of XI.11, with USDA soy sauce salt), and the bite's balance score against a savoury target.

What you will learn
Workshop
Bite = 85 % dumpling (taken as 0.8 % salt, 0.5 % sugar, 0.1 % umami as MSG) + 15 % sauce. Sauce from tablespoons (15 g) of soy sauce (salt from USDA FoodData Central sodium, umami 1 % as MSG, teaching), black vinegar (5 % acid), water, and teaspoons (4 g) of sugar. Tastes and balance from the course perception model (XI.11).

Make it strong, balance it on the food

In this model a plain dumpling scores 0.54 on balance; dipped in neat soy sauce it falls to 0.32, because salt runs far past the target while nothing sour or sweet answers it; with 1 tablespoon each of soy and black vinegar, a teaspoon of sugar and two tablespoons of water it rises to 0.83. The sauce itself is very salty — that is correct for a dip, which only touches each bite.

Ratios to start from, then adjust by tasting on the food (I.7): dumpling dip, soy : black vinegar : water 1 : 1 : 1, a pinch of sugar, chilli oil and garlic to taste. 糖醋汁 for sweet-and-sour, roughly sugar : vinegar : soy : water 2 : 2 : 1 : 3, thickened last (XXII.9). Vinaigrette, oil : acid 3 : 1 with salt and mustard (X.3). Salsa: tomato, onion, chilli, coriander, lime and salt, rested 15 minutes so the salt draws juice (XX.1). Pesto: basil, pine nuts, garlic, parmesan, olive oil, pounded or pulsed briefly to keep it cool and green. Keep garlic-in-oil sauces cold and use them within days (XIII.8).

At the stove

Make the 1 : 1 : 1 dumpling dip and a dish of neat soy sauce. Taste a dumpling with each, and adjust the dip until you prefer it.

The Sichuan 怪味 ("strange flavour") sauce for cold chicken combines salty, sweet, sour, numbing, hot, savoury and nutty all at once — sesame paste, soy, sugar, vinegar, chilli oil and Sichuan pepper — and is meant to taste of none in particular.

Terms

蘸料
A dipping sauce, tasted on the food.
调味汁
A mixed sauce or dressing built to a ratio.
Pesto
Herbs, nuts, cheese and oil pounded into a paste.
Balance
Tastes in proportion, none dominating (XI.11).
Cold sauces live on fresh ingredients and balance. A dipping sauce is tasted on the food, so it is made strong and balanced in that dilution: soy for salt and umami, vinegar to lift, a little sugar to round.

Sources

  1. USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy (April 2018), public domain.
  2. S. S. Stevens, Psychophysics, Wiley, 1975: taste intensity grows as a power of concentration; exponents near 1.3 for sucrose and sodium chloride. The course uses teaching exponents near the published ones.
  3. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.