Hoisin: This Sweet, Salty Sauce Is A Savior

It's the sauce I have to have.

If an open jar on the refrigerator door is all I have on hand . . . don't ask. It could get ugly. That's how strongly I feel about hoisin.

The thick molasses-colored sweet and spicy Asian sauce is, to my mind, one of the greatest cooking condiments ever invented - and a pantry necessity. There is little this stuff can't improve.

And in terms of saving your fanny when you can't think of a single thing to make for dinner - trust me, hoisin is the greatest quick fix since pizza home delivery.

Hoisin (pronounced HOY-sihn) is a thick mixture of soybean paste, garlic, sugar, chilies and spices.

How does it taste? Think Chinese spareribs. Think barbecue sauce but richer, more intense. Think Peking duck, says Chinese cooking authority Ken Hom.

Jars of hoisin sauce can easily be found in the supermarket (usually near the soy sauce). Although it's widely used in Chinese cooking, the Chinese mainly consider hoisin a table condiment. Little containers of it show up in Chinese restaurants the way bottles of ketchup do in American places. In fact, at least one chef I know refers to it as "Chinese ketchup," it's that ubiquitous.

Fortunately, it's much more versatile than the red stuff.

I use it to lacquer a split chicken for Chinese barbecued chicken. I use it in a marinade for leg of lamb or flank steak. I mix it with orange marmalade for a roast chicken glaze. I use it, cut with some soy sauce and chili paste, as "glue" to keep a sesame-seed coating on my salmon before baking. And on really bad days, I'll pan-fry some frozen Chinese dumplings, pass a bowl of hoisin-and-soy sauce for dipping and consider myself a culinary genius.

"Oh, hoisin - it's my no-brainer dinner," says New Englander Nina Simonds, author of "China Express" (Morrow, 1993). The busy mother of a 9-year-old, who's also working on a new cookbook, says her favorite save-the-day dinner is to marinate a chicken with hoisin, chopped garlic, soy and American ketchup. "It makes your house smell good. It's delicious."

Hoisin, Simonds says, "tastes familiar to people, maybe because it touches on the same flavors as barbecue sauce." And, like barbecue sauce, it goes best with roasted meats "or anything that tastes sort of fatty," she notes, "like pork, duck and salmon."

Chef Matthew Lake, the guy who calls it Chinese ketchup, says hoisin can work wonders even in very small quantities. It's a great "bridge ingredient," helping tie other flavors together, he says. He uses just a touch of hoisin to balance the flavors in his coconut curry soup, and adds a hint of sweetness with it to a soy reduction sauce for seared tuna.

What makes hoisin so appealing, says Philadelphia cookbook author Andrew Schloss, is its perfect balance of sweet, sour and salt. "You can taste them all at once in hoisin," he says, "and they zap back and forth in your mouth. It tastes exciting."