Mixed sauce 混合醬 Wahn Hahp Jeung
List of other recipes on this blog that uses this sauce:
炆牛腩 Braised Beef Brisket
叉燒 Cha Siu
叉燒排骨 Cha Siu Spare Ribs
腊肉 Laap Yuk
蒸茄子 Steamed eggplant
According to my parents, wahn hahp jeung is an invention of Hong Kong chefs. This sauce can be considered a building block sauce since it is very versatile and can be used in dishes for vegetables, fish, pork, and beef. It’s also very concentrated so it has a very long shelf life when kept in an airtight container in the fridge. I’ve been told that once this is made and stored in the fridge, it won’t go bad and leaving this in the fridge for three to four years won’t be a problem.
When I asked for this recipe from my mom, I asked her to text the name of the sauce in Chinese so I could try to do some translating myself. My dad is terrible with technology and still hasn’t learned how to text, so I didn’t ask him to do this for me. I try to learn the names of dishes from other cultures in the original language. Not just because limiting myself to English seems lazy, but because I know I’m cutting out part of the culture and context associated with a dish.
There’s very little standardization of romanizing Cantonese on restaurant menus. It can be very overwhelming with the plethora of Cantonese dialects, various systems of romanizing Cantonese, and sometimes you come across inventions new English names for dishes that has no connection to the original name. For example, this common dim sum dish, 豬腸粉 jyu cheuhng fan (pig intestine noodles) does not contain any pork or intestines in the noodles. Apparently, they are called this because the tube-like noodles resembles the shape of pig intestines. On the English menu, I’ve seen these noodles listed as crepes or some kind of rolled noodle. Another example would be braised chicken feet found in dim sum menus, but the actual name is 鳳爪 fuhng jaau (phoenix claws). Then you have examples of names that are hard to translate such as 鹵水 louh seui which refers to a specific kind of spiced brine, commonly used as a poaching liquid for ducks or geese. There is a version of this brine that does not have soy sauce in it and it’s called 白鹵水 baahk louh seui (a white louh seui) and is used for poaching chickens. Since most Americans wouldn’t be familiar with this brine, I’ve seen it on a menu listed as “Chef’s No. 1 Chicken”.
Chinese is a difficult language for Americans to learn particularly because English lacks pitch and tone. I assume English speakers that never learned Chinese will very likely butcher the pitches and tones so it doesn’t bother me. I decided to use the Yale romanization of Cantonese since it’s still widely used in language books and phonetically intuitive for English speakers. Going forward, I’ll try to include as much Yale romanization (in Cantonese) for anybody that wants to try and learn the actual name of dishes.
I never expected this, but when I got the text from my mom about the Chinese name for this sauce, I got the entire recipe in Chinese. So here it is, straight from my phone is the recipe for this sauce from my mom.
混合醬制法：兩樽豆辦醬，－樽海鮮醬，半樽芝麻醬，－樽水，三茶匙沙糖。先將水煮滾，倒入豆辦醬，海鮮醬，芝麻醬，沙糖－起煮滾，待凍，入樽即可。
Mixed sauce recipe:
(All jar measurements are referring to the jars that’s made common for the Koon Chun brand. The bean sauces comes in 13 oz jars and the hoisin sauce comes in 15 oz jars. You can use either jar as a unit of measurement for the instructions below.)
2 jars of 豆瓣醬 dau baahn jeung I recommend Koon Chun’s Bean Sauce*
1 jar of 海鮮醬 hoi sin jeung I recommend Koon Chun’s Hoisin Sauce
½ jar (6.5 to 7.5 oz) of sesame paste or tahini
1 jar (13-15 oz) of water
3 teaspoons of sugar. This is closer to 2 1/4 tablespoons. (The instructions are transliterated to teaspoons and my mom refers to a regular sized metal spoon. Whatever that means... These spoon measurements are the bane of learning how to cook from my parents and many other immigrant Chinese parents. These ‘teaspoons’ deserves a dedicated post in the future.)
First, boil the water [in a wok or large pot]. Add the bean sauce, hoisin sauce, sesame paste, and sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil. Cool, then place in a clean jar. [My parents seal metal lid jars with a layer of plastic wrap in the lid to make it more airtight. For plastic lids, they say it’s more airtight and won’t need the plastic wrap.]
*Notes about this kind of bean sauce. Koon Chun makes a regular and a ground version. My parents have told me that Chinese cooks and chefs say it’s better to use the chunky version of this sauce and you can tell by looking at the bottle and seeing cracked beans in the sauce. According to them, the unground version made with soybeans that are fermented longer and developed better flavor than the ground version.
Also, when you look at the label for Koon Chun’s bean sauce, it says 原晒豉 which is not 豆瓣醬 dau baahn jeung. Dau baahn jeung is an umbrella term for fermented soybean sauce and there are many versions of this that exist outside the context of Chinese cooking. In China, there are regional variations for this kind of fermented bean sauce and Koon Chun is a Cantonese/Hong Kong version. The label 原晒豉 yuhn saai sih is transliterated as “original sun-dried fermented soybeans”. The one part that’s tricky to translate is the “original” part where my mom explained that this is referring to the fermented soybeans where they were not processed and have retained their original form.
