Hoisin Sauce

Also Called

Cantonese tianmianjiang, haixianjiang

Usage

as seasoning, as a dipping sauce for roasted dishes

Description

Hoisin sauce is presented as a deep red paste. It is essentially an upgraded version of mochijiang. Specifically, sugar and garlic are added to the prototype sauce mochijiang to make it suitable for seasoning fish and seafood dishes. This is also the origin of its name: “hoisin,” which means seafood in Chinese, doesn't imply that the sauce contains seafood as an ingredient, but rather that the sauce is concocted for cooking seafood. Besides being suitable for cooking seafood, it was later discovered that this sauce from Cantonese cuisine bears a resemblance in taste profile to the tianmianjiang from Huabei, a geographical region that is part of northern China. Therefore, hoisin sauce is also used as a dipping sauce for dishes such as roasted duck. However, it is worth noting that although hoisin sauce and tianmianjiang are often considered interchangeable in practical applications, they have fundamental differences in production. Tianmianjiang is made from fermented wheat flour and does not contain soybeans, so it does not belong to the broad family of soybean pastes.