My House Sauce

Recipe Guideline and Background

Mark Brown

August 25, 2022

My formative years as a cook, from about 2008-13, were pretty exploratory. I learned a lot of techniques and focused on working with flavors I wasn’t familiar with. That led me to the sauce I am writing about today. At this point, it’s essentially my house sauce, so to speak. I’ve made it so many times with both the original ingredients and substitutes that I know what to expect from it just about every time. That’s ultimately the point of learning how to cook. I have other parts of my cooking repertoire that go along with is vein so there will be some essays about that in the future.

This sauce is a combination of a couple different sauces and ingredients: Hoisin sauce, Sambal Oleke, honey, black pepper, mustard, rice wine vinegar, and sesame oil. Each of those ingredients brings something necessary to the party. Sauces like this need to be balanced before they can be focused on a dominant flavor, which is the true reason why this sauce works for just about anything I make it with.

Hoisin is the salty part that helps brings out the other flavors. It is the true backbone of the sauce. It’s one of the 2 ingredients that cannot be substituted. As ethnically Asian sauces go, it’s unique. I don’t care for soy sauce because it’s like licking s block of salt with no flavor. Same for teriyaki sauces. They are just too sweet. I have heard hoisin sauce called “Chinese ketchup” and “Chinese barbecue sauce.” Pretty accurate, if my opinion matters. I have discovered that brands of hoisin sauce range from decently salty to full-on salt licks so understand that ahead of time. This will require experimentation with different brands to land on the flavor profile of choice.

Sambal Oleke is a particular brand of chili garlic sauce that are in regular grocery stores. It’s one of the more known ones, if I recall. Sriracha is the other brand that people associate this flavor with. I prefer Sambal to Sriracha mostly because I like the chunkier nature of the sauce. Sambal is very powerful on its own. It delivers a serious punch of flavor to this sauce. What makes it especially useful for the cook is that it barely takes any to get the intended effect. It’s that strong. In theory, any chili garlic branded sauce would work as a substitute. I don’t think garlic and chiles individually would work because there is something in Sambal Oleke and Sriracha that take the chile and garlic up a notch.

Honey obviously plays the part of sweet in this sauce. This sauce would be completely unbalanced without a serious element of sweetness. The salt of hoisin and the punch of Sambal Oleke would be completely overpowering. Honey’s flavor is unique among all the sweet ingredients that could be used here. It’s hard to describe the flavor of honey. It’s one of those flavors that one knows its in there when they taste it but fails to put actual words to. While I do prefer a clover honey, I’m not picky here because most of the time it’s not playing lead actor in this sauce. I have substituted molasses for it when I was out of honey and it performed admirably. Molasses presents a different flavor profile because it it derived from sugarcane. It’s less bright. That’s the best way I can put it. It offers a different kind of complexity and is a worthy sub. I’m sure there are other syrup-type sweeteners that would do well. I have used Agave Syrup for a habanero sauce so I wonder how it work…

Black pepper is another punch of flavor to this sauce. It cannot excluded or subbed out for a different spice. Black peppercorns offer a heat only available from it. In that way, it gives a different kind of heat that what the Sambal Oleke or Sriracha would be giving. Freshly ground pepper very coarsely would work best because the oils in the peppercorns themselves would be most present. However, anything black pepper coarse ground within a week or 2 of the sauce being made would be fine. There is a significant amount of it in the sauce. Even in this sea of flavor, I can still taste the black pepper. Pre-ground pepper from the grocery store has its place. That’s at the grocery store on the shelf.

Mustard is like every other ingredient here. It’s unique to itself. That said, there are thousands of mustard brands in hundreds of styles. Feel free to experiment with them. I will just say which ones I use more prevalently. I’m not a major fan of mustard on its own. In fact, I don’t use it as a condiment on anything. I keep it around as a complimentary flavor. The style that almost always goes into this when I make it is dijon mustard. Equally almost always is the brand I use, Grey Poupon. It’s a very, very sharp flavor that is completely different than American style yellow mustards, which I despise with every fiber of my soul. There is a fair bit of mustard in the sauce so it will be around, even if it isn’t playing many minutes, so to speak. Dried mustard or ground mustard seeds will also work here. The ingredient is playing a different role as well: Emulsifier. Sauces that combine oil with vinegar will separate unless the cook does something to help them stay together. Some of them are designed to be together for mere minutes at a time. Others to stay together to the end, even during a re-heat. This is the latter. Mustard does an extremely good job at making sauces stay together. That is the other reason it’s here.

Rice vinegar is the best choice of vinegar for this sauce because it is mild in taste and sharpness. The sauce already has standout flavors and doesn’t need the vinegar to compete. It just needs to regulate all of them so there’s not too much happening. The vinegar serves 2 purposes in the sauce. The first is what I just mentioned. The second is that the addition of vinegar takes the viscosity of the combined above ingredients from brown ketchup to a thickened but pourable liquid. Oil doesn’t blend well with thick ingredients. In theory, any liquid would accomplish this task but the vinegar is necessary for flavor reasons. There’s not a lot of substitutes here, though. White wine vinegar tends to be a heavier, sharper flavor than rice vinegar so it will throw its weight around a bit. Anything beyond white wine vinegar would be a bit out of place.

Sesame oil is a necessary component of my house sauce because it can stand up to the other bold flavors and gives a very pleasant aroma come eating time, especially after being heated in one of the various ways it would happen. It has a very strong flavor on its own. Sesame oil is used in a lot of Chinese dishes in part because it can stand up to insane amounts of heat before it goes bad. Woks typically cook so hot and fast because the burners typically used for that particular pan use a ton of natural gas as a heat source. Could I get away with blending some vegetable or canola oil if I ran out of sesame oil? Probably. The sauce would lack the aroma and flavor if it was just the former 2 oils.

The ratio of these ingredients is what makes this sauce special. It’s very adaptable to the desired flavor of the day. It has to work well together. Typically for a sauce to be truly balanced it has to have hot, sour, salty, and sweet. Umami is also said to be a fifth flavor, but that’s a different entry for another time. I can accent which of those 4 flavors I want by simply changing the ratio of that particular ingredient. That might seem facepalmingly self evident on the surface but there is more to putting an accent on food than just adding more of one thing. All of the ingredients have to be in harmony together, regardless of the dominantly accented flavor.

So here goes my best attempt to make a guideline for my house sauce:

More Hoisin Sauce than any other ingredient other than vinegar and oil.
Close to equal part of honey to Hoisin.
3-4 heavy pinches of coarse black pepper
1-2 actual tablespoons Sambal Oleke
1-2 actual tablespoons of mustard
Enough rice wine vinegar to turn the above into a pourable liquid.
Enough oil to ensure the sauce stays together.

Put the hoisin, honey, black pepper, mustard, and Sambal into a large enough bowl and whisk together just to combine them all into a thick sauce. Add the vinegar to the bowl and wish until the liquid could be poured if necessary. Add oil to the bowl and which until oil can’t be seen in the sauce. It shouldn’t take that long. Doing it in a mason jar would be easier. Put it all in and shake.

Typically I use about 4-5 tablespoons of hoisin sauce, about a 4-5 second squeeze of the honey bottle, and a 3-4 ounce pour of both vinegar and oil in the end. I know this is annoying imprecise, but that’s how this kind of recipe development works. It’s been with me for at least 12 years. I’ve made versions of this sauce heavy on the Sambal and heavy on honey. The former was quite intense with a lingering burn that was just right. I do that by going closer to the 2 then the 1 tablespoon I listed above. I don’t make this sauce a lot but it is fully learned now so I never have to think too hard about it. I like it best as a glaze for meat, especially when grilled, but it also makes a great marinade or stir fry sauce. One potential addition to my sauce when used as the latter is corn starch, ideally diluted with the vinegar. Stir fry sauces are usually thickened with corn starch anyways, so might as well mix it right in. However, remember that corn starch needs to be fully cooked out to get rid of its chalky flavor. Only do the corn starch addition for stir frying.

So there it is. My cooking secrets are starting to release all over the Internet. The ingredients I listed aren’t normally too expensive and usually last quite awhile unless they get used a lot. One thing to note is that while they can be found in most grocery stores, they are very rarely ever on sale. I know that might not be important to say for most people who will read this but it is worth mentioning. This sauce really is dynamic and is probably one of my most successful cooking ventures of my lifetime. Experiment with it and enjoy.