many east asian dishes included some ready made sauce like 豆瓣酱 or 柱侯酱 in chinese cuisines or 고추장 in korean cuisine. These sauces make our dishes delicious but unfortunately they are very high in salt and/or sugars. Is there some way to make the dishes with these sauces from scratch or without such high salt/sugar? We often have to add sugar in the dish in addition to the sauces. Thanks.
I’m sure this is a similar problem in other cuisines but my question is just about east asian cuisines.
edit: i’m referring to homemade food, not restaurant food.
Look up the recipes from 100 years ago or more. They will have less sugar because it wasn’t as common.
YouTube has many people posting videos of keto dishes, head bangers kitchen is great. They remove all of the sugar from the dish. Or they remake in the traditional way. They give you step by step instructions
Google doesn’t let you filter results to 100 years ago so were out of luck.
You could maybe sub half the doubianjiang with low sodium miso, its not an exact subsitute but i figure it’ll still provide that strong flavor you want
I don’t really know anything about cooking Asian food past a curry, but in general I tend to just skip out on unhealthy stuff I won’t miss when I cook at home for my family.
For example, if I was making barbecue chicken for a gathering, I’d use a good amount of brown sugar for a nice caramelization and depth of flavor. I made it at home for myself last week, however, and just didn’t add the sugar. Was it worse? Sure, a little, but I likely wouldn’t have noticed if you didn’t tell me and it’s one less meal full of sugar.
I am trying to train myself that not every meal I make has to be a treat, and that sometimes just being healthy and filling is enough.
Going a different direction with the flavors is another option. Lemon pepper chicken instead of barbecue chicken, or a vinaigrette dressing instead of a cream sauce. Some of these alternate recipes still have plenty of intense flavors without being as intense on the calories.
This doesn’t really answer my question, these sauces are staples/basics in Asian dishes, we cannot just eliminate entire categories of dishes
The Lemmy answer is beans. Japanese food I know, but also Korean and Chinese food use beans in every which way which taste great.
Most probably you need soy sauce for asian dishes. Luckily there are a bunch of soy types. Maybe you could check out sweet soy sauces, perhaps those have lower sodium content.
I am not referring to soy sauce, I don’t know about gochujang but I have not seen low sodium versions of doubanjiang anywhere, maybe I can’t look around
This is one of the sauces I mean: https://www.malafood.com/en/essential-guide-to-doubanjiangs
are you by chance an enterprising individual? it sounds like you’ve stumbled onto an underserved and untapped market: healthier alternatives to traditional base ingredients. i’d be very surprised if there were not methods waiting to be discovered for prepping bean paste, fish sauce, doubanjiang etc in more health-conscious ways. the question is, who can combine culinary expertise, fermentation knowledge, cultural respect and a drive to innovate?
i’d be very surprised if there were not methods waiting to be discovered for prepping bean paste, fish sauce, doubanjiang etc in more health-conscious ways.
i think the problem is all of these pastes are fermented and i at least don’t know how to ferment something without using a lot of salt. even make your own doubanjiang paste will tell you to use a lot of salt to ferment the beans