chicken broth with miso

Brown rice miso in chicken broth, which would be good right there, but why stop? Enhanced with ginger and garlic, fish sauce, and toasted sesame seed oil. The ginger and garlic are fresh, not powdered. The fish sauce is fermented anchovy in water, mostly. Plus habanero flakes, and 1/2 teaspoon sugar. Oh yeah, and sweet peas and onion. See what's going on here? You can make miso with just water and it'd be fine, but this, this is savory, salty, and sweet and hot all at once. It lacked only tartness, but I was holding back. That there's what you call restraint.

You were probably taught there are four taste senses, salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. You can tell the person who made up that list was Eurocentric. If I were the guy making up words for taste sensations I'd be sure to include chile peppers, chocolate and vanilla. Japanese have a name for a fifth taste sense, called umami, responsive to glutamic acid salts, which are in your butt. Just kidding. It's like MSG. The word means delicious flavor. So how's that for precision? It also means meaty, savory, or brothy. The umami taste is the detection of amino acids in meat and cheese. Parsley and garlic are umami in Western cooking. Dashi, fish broth made from kombu seaweed and bonito katsuobushi dry tuna flakes is umami in Japanese cuisine. More on this later sometime when I feel like showing you what these things look like. I'll show you how to make fish soup without any fish heads, and what's inside those packages in the wonderfully bizarre world of an Asian market.

If you doubt any of this then I urge you to open up a browser window since your right here at a computer anyway, and see for yourself if I knoweth whereof I speaketh.

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