Jan 07 2009
Calendar Calamity
Dunno if it was a poor recipe or overly-authentic ingredients, but this dish was near-inedible!
- Good Food Calendar 2009- January
It looked scrummy in the picture. Chicken with a glossy soy glaze and asian greens, crunchy vs succulent. It looked dead authentic on the plate, with an ice-cold Asahi beer on the side and some rice for starch.
It tasted of soy sauce. Cloyingly salty. Sticky and thirst-making. Unusually for me, I couldn’t finish it.
The problem may well have been that the recipe called for light soy sauce and we used dark. Further to this, whilst it is only Amoy, our soy sauce comes from a Chinese supermarket and we’ve commented before that it is blacker than any soy we’ve seen before. So perhaps it was simply the wrong condiment to cook with. To be honest though, this meal was so poisonous I won’t be going back to find out!
That would definitely be the problem. You use dark in the place of salt, and light when you’re just going for flavour. You can substitute, but you’d need A LOT less of the dark. Sorry it didn’t turn out! :(
The funny thing is, in the past I’ve only ever used dark, and had looked down on light as a sort of watered down inadequate. At home I would slosh dark all over fried rice, noodles, whatver, with no problems.
I think in fact I’ve perhaps only come across somewhat inauthentic dark (and indeed, perhaps the equivalent light really was just watered down!) and so it hadn’t mattered. Or it’s been light but I’ve believed it to be dark- that wouldn’t surprise me!
We’d commented before on just how much like an oil slick this stuff looks. Clearly when buying from the Chinese supermarket- seeing as the stuff is practically free there- we might as well buy both!