Mayonnaise is not something that I often find myself using. My mom never really used it when we were kids - I can't remember her ever making tuna salad and it certainly never got used as a sandwich spread. Truth be told, I've always found mayo to be a fairly revolting substance. I don't know why; I think it's partially because I have no idea what it is. (So I just looked it up - at its simplest, it's an egg yolk with olive oil added in, trivial to make at home. Doesn't make it any more appetizing.) I love emulsions, in general; I love drinking them, putting them on my salads, and smothering foods in them.
Here's the thing, though. You ever have one of those days, where you're all like "I've got a substance I'd like to coat another substance with. But my first substance simply does not take a form which makes spreading convenient!" Of course you have. We all have! And, if you're anything like me - and I'm sure that you are - you then thought, "Aha! What I need is some sort of neutral-tasting organic emulsion - something which will be viscous enough to trap and contain whatever it is that I want spread, yet won't change its flavor significantly."
That was pretty clever of you.
So, despite my distaste for it, I will generally keep a small jar of it around the house. It's good if I want to make a creamy honey mustard sauce, or... Or. Oh! Or if someone comes to my house who... wants... a fairly lousy spread... on a sandwich? Hmm.
Anyway, I've got some mayo in my fridge.
So we had Yousef and Sarah over for fondue.
(Wait, before I go any further, let me spoil the ending. Two days after this, I was in the supermarket, and saw wasabi mayo for sale on the shelf. I was all like, "Huh.")
Fondue. I'm a big fan - a big enough fan that I own three fondue pots. (You really need three - one for cheese, one for broth or oil, one for dessert. A second one for the main course isn't terrible either.) For the main course, I had lamb, steak, chorizo, shrimp, and some mushrooms.
A big part of the fun of fondue - and a part that, I am ashamed to admit, I rarely give the attention it deserves - is the sauce. You're eating twenty or thirty single-bite portions of various different items, with a three or four minute interval between each piece. Time and wine do their job cleaning your palate; there's no overarching theme that needs to be obeyed. A perfect opportunity to set out a cornucopia of different sauces, and let each bite be its own combination of flavors.
But as I said, this is a part of the meal that I often neglect - and lamb is not something that we eat frequently. (I do, however, frequently remark that I wished I thought to get lamb more often.) So when I was looking for sauces that I thought would go well with it, I came up nearly empty - a can of mango chutney was about it. Then I thought... what about some kind of wasabi sauce? We have the technology! Plus, I'll get a blog post out of it.
Here's the embarrassing part - remember when I was all like, "all these wasabi things are actually really easy?" Yeah. Wasabi mayo. Make up some wasabi paste. Mix it with the mayo to taste. Make sure to give it a few minutes to develop its flavor.
Oh, you can do other stuff with it - I added some rice vinegar and a tiny bit of soy sauce. But basically, the equation is wasabi + mayonnaise = wasabi mayonnaise.
It was simple - but it was also stellar. The bowl with it in was practically licked clean by the end of the night. The mayo smoothed out the heat of the wasabi enough that it had a little kick, but no harsh bite. The rice vinegar thinned it enough that just the right amount stuck to each bite. And the soy sauce gave the whole concoction just enough of a twang to stay interesting bite after bite. It went great on both the lamb and the shrimp - although I'd be lying if I didn't I also tried it on the mushrooms, steak, and chorizo. The chorizo, not so much, but everything else? Pure yum. (Is "pure yum" some product's slogan?)
A few days later, I had a piece of salmon sitting around waiting to become dinner, and no particular brainstorms about how that process should go. I had kept the wasabi mayo in the back of my head, though, and this seemed like a perfect time to give it another go.
It would require some slight adaptation, though. First, I wanted something that was a bit runnier - something that I could drizzle over the salmon after I cooked it. Second, I was planning on doing something fairly simple with the fish - poaching or baking - so I wanted something a little bit more complex than the two-note sauce that I had made for the fondue. I just wasn't sure, though, exactly how to change it.
As always, she saved me. No, not my wife. What were you thinking? Martha Stewart, of course. Riding across the fens on a white charger, the leatherwork on her saddle resplendent in its handcrafted beauty. Riding crop held high, her mouth an angry line, used to obedience and control... but could that anger be, perhaps, turned to love?
I'm getting off track. I got a recipe from her website.
It sounded like just what the doctor ordered, throwing some ginger and lime juice into the mix. However, there was still one thing that I couldn't get over - the simple fact that I was still using, as my base, mayonnaise. Why? I don't like mayo! It's boring! It doesn't add much! And when I opened the fridge, there, right in front, was the Greek yogurt.
Greek yogurt is strained yogurt - yogurt with the whey removed, so it's a lot thicker and tangier. As I've mentioned previously, Yousef once used it instead of sour cream when cooking for us, and since then I've been a fan of replacing sour cream with it. Would it work in place of mayo?
Here is the sauce I wound up making:
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
1/4 cup cilantro leaves
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 1/2 inches of fresh ginger, chopped fine
Salt and pepper to taste
3 teaspoons wasabi paste
Now, we're going to make the wasabi paste a little bit differently here. Usually, it's equal volumes powder and water, going a little bit light on the water and adding more slowly until all the powder is mixed into paste. The problem with that is that it leaves a lot of little scraps of paste all over the vessel you're mixing in. And, since this recipe calls for a bit of extra water anyway, we're going to just toss it straight into the wasabi. Mix an extra teaspoon of water into the wasabi, and you should have a fairly liquid mess - more than enough water to dissolve all the wasabi fully.
Toss everything into the blender, and pulse once or twice. Seriously; that's it. The mayo version of the sauce suggests keeping an extra tablespoon or two of water handy, in case you need it. My yogurt-based version came out a bit more watery than I'd like - I added more water to the wasabi than I suggested above - so I doubt you'll need anything extra.
More than anything else, this sauce tasted like a wasabi-flavored tzadziki sauce - the Greek sauce that goes on gyros. Lo and behold, when I looked up strained yogurt to find out what it was, I found that it is the main component of tzadziki. The spicing is different, of course, but anyone who eats a lot of Greek food will definitely taste the similarities. I thought it was a spectacular compliment to the fish, and it looked pretty nice, too:
The mushrooms are, of course, wasabi stuffed mushrooms - I'll get to them tomorrow on Wednesday.
One last thing, and I'll call it a day. I should have gotten the message by now, but I keep getting reminded just how fragile wasabi is. I pulled the fish out of the oven, put it on our plates, and poured the sauce over it. It was delicious, but with just a bare hint of the wasabi - a tiny bit of bite at the back end, and that's it. That's okay; it's a fairly large amount of sauce, compared to the volume of the wasabi, and yogurt is used in Indian food to cut down on spiciness, isn't it? (I should have thought about that earlier.)
After the fish was gone, I still had a taste for the sauce. I pulled out some carrots and used it as a dip - and was floored at how spicy the sauce was. It didn't taste precisely like wasabi - something was spreading it out more, turning that flashpaper burn into something a bit slower, a bit more mild and tangy - but the sauce that had rested on the hot fish was barely spicy at all. A little heat, and the sauce turned into something else. Startling and quite fun.
I wonder if that's an effect that you could use? It would be neat to find a way to make a meal whose flavor changed as it cooled.
No comments:
Post a Comment