Question
FRED GRUBER
A traditional chinese ginger scallion sauce for chicken is made of ginger, scallion, salt, and oil. How can we replace the oil?
Answer
So this is gonna be a little harder just because the ginger scallion sauce is traditionally, I mean that fat is kind of your binder. It keeps everything on together. And you know, the way you traditionally make that kind of a sauce, it's kinda like a chili oil, right? So you take your ginger and your scallions cut 'em up really finely, you can salt it as well, but then you typically take a hot oil and pour it over to be able to cook all of those things. So that's gonna be very, very different without oil. Now you can try a host of different things to be able to kind of mimic the fat too, because that's actually the fat is helping to carry the flavor on that, but it's gonna be really hard to be able to do that specific sauce. Now, the closest thing I can think of, just thinking up the top of my head here, would probably be something like a tahini sauce or something where you can take tahini and water it down a little bit. But on this, you'd have to actually cook your ginger in your scallion first. You can use the salt if you want to, um, but cook that and then mix in your ginger and scallion and with the, um, watered down tahini. Um, you might wanna put a little garlic in there too for flavor, but that's completely up to you as well. Um, but that will actually make a sauce that can coat something as well. It's gonna have your fat, but it's gonna cook very differently than your original one was because the other oil that you would use should just be a, a clear high heat oil. And when you're looking at that sauce, it's primarily oil is kind of what it is. So the closest I can think of would probably be a tahini, um, or, you know, if you could use other fats, that's fine. You could do like a cashew, you know, like what we do for a cashew bechamel where you soak the cashews and then blend them up and then use that as kind of your fat, you know, and then put the ginger and scion cooked again, of course, um, into that as well. But what we're kind of looking for is a fat to be able to get those flavors, the ginger and scion in there. Now, after doing that, um, you know, cooking your ginger, your scallion and then incorporating it into the tahini or the cashew, whatever you want to, you probably wanna let it soak in there and sit for a while, probably overnight to be able to help the fat absorb some of the flavor from the ginger and the scallions as well. But either way, you're gonna be using a lot of ginger and a lot of scallions for those sauces. I hope that helps. That's a little hard one to do. No oil, and I've never tried that. That's just thinking off the top of my head where I would probably go with that.
