Add Any One of These Ingredients to Punch Up Flavor
The secret of soy sauce, dashi, sake, and miso
The seasonings for traditional Japanese food are usually quite simple: soy sauce with a bit of grated ginger, or soup with miso paste and a bit of wakame in it. In recipes, the ingredient list tends to only be a few lines long and the directions can be pared down to just a few statements.
- Sashimi: a plate of sliced raw fish served with soy sauce and wasabi.
- Hiyayakko: a dish of chilled tofu served with hijiki, chopped green onion, and some soy sauce.
- Miso soup: a bowl of miso paste, wakame, and some cubed tofu.
It became increasingly apparent to me that Japanese cuisine is about skillfully using a few key ingredients for savoriness: soy sauce, dashi, sake, and miso (mirin is sake with sugar, mentsuyu is soy sauce with dashi). Almost every recipe uses at least one of them, if not several of them in combination.
Why is that? Turns out they’re standard ingredients for a reason: All of these seasonings go through some sort of fermentation process that makes them very rich in umami.
