Remember way back in March, when fear of widespread shortages led to epic Costo lines and the hottest accessory was a 50 pound bag of rice? The food system has not completely broken down, but you probably stocked up on enough beans and pasta and dried grains to make a prepper proud—and now that you're cooking all or most of your meals for yourself, you're getting bored. Frequent shopping trips and piles of fresh produce aren't on the menu. And you can only handle so many bowls of cacio é pepe. Salvation lies in everyone's favorite fifth taste sensation: umami.
Throughout years of hosting a supper club out of my home, I’ve come to rely on a handful of non-perishable sources of savory base notes, things that add a welcome hit of umami to practically any recipe more complicated than a PB&J. Whether you’re an enterprising cook or not, these essentials are guaranteed to invigorate anything you make, including your fallback dishes. And, okay, yes: They’ll spiff up delivery too.
Fish Sauce
Fish sauce is a bedrock flavor of Southeast Asian classics like pad Thai and pho...and a secret weapon in everything else. Deployed in very small quantities, nothing else can so effectively impart such a complex undertone: sprinkled on roasted vegetables, rubbed on a whole chicken before roasting, used as a seasoning in beans, stews, or salad dressing. Try rubbing a few drops of fish sauce onto a steak a few hours before searing, and marvel as it tastes somehow steakier. Use it any time you’d ordinarily add more salt.
Red Boat is the brand to beat. It’s made in Vietnam from salted wild anchovies that ferment for more than a year in traditional wooden barrels. Even a small bottle will last a while—at least at first, until you start putting it in everything.
Red Boat Fish Sauce
$14.00, Amazon
Miso
The salty paste made from soybeans and gut-healthy probiotic rice koji is lightly sweet, nutty, and deeply savory. It comes in two main styles: White is delicate and versatile, while red is meatier and more obviously fermented. Whisked into broth or warm water, either type will make an exceptional base in which to cook seafood, vegetables, or even a pack of instant noodles. You won’t see this in Jerusalem, but a tablespoon or two blitzed into hummus adds a subtle density and depth. And then we all love the wildly inauthentic Japanese steakhouse miso salad dressing, right? That’s not the only salad dressing it works in. Try a spoonful in anything from Caesar to vinaigrette—it adds a savory acidity like an aged cheese.
Namikura White Miso
$15.00, Amazon
Tomato Paste
You probably already have a tube of tomato paste at home, but it’s not only for fortifying marinara sauce. Tomatoes contain tons of MSG, a.k.a. the compound responsible for savory umami flavor. Just a squeeze of the concentrate helps turn up the volume in simple slow-cooked projects like a beef stew or a lentil soup. It also makes a great base for DIY condiments: try mixing tomato paste with olive oil, salt, and plenty of chili flakes. One big spoonful of this concoction will take a frozen brick of Trader Joe's salmon very far.
Stick to tubes, which tend to be imported from Italy and made with higher quality tomatoes that have been processed at a lower temperature than their American canned counterparts. I like Mutti, from Parma.
Mutti Tomato Paste
$22.00, Amazon
Anchovies
Heads up: It’s not cool to hate on anchovies any more. The breakout recipe of the coronavirus crisis is Alison Roman’s caramelized shallot pasta, which seems like it should be renamed, since it calls for an entire can of the little fish. But, like fish sauce, its complexity is also apparent when used in moderation. One or two little fillets melted into garlicky olive oil will enrich most recipes, whether a humble pot of beans or sautéed bitter greens.
Anchovies, in their most basic form, come as a flat tin of fillets. For these, the brand doesn’t matter so much, but make sure to get those packed in olive oil, which is delicious in its own right—I like to fortify salad dressings with it. For flashy, extra all-in-one flavor, consider a jar of anchovies packed in oil with famously fiery chilies from the southern Italian region of Calabria.
Tutto Calabria Anchovies
$13.00, Buon Italia
Gochujang
Think of it as ketchup’s spicy and extremely sophisticated cousin: a uniquely sweet, spicy, and funky fermented Korean hot pepper paste. You may know it best as the star of bibimbap sauce, but it’s perfect on its own as a dip for chicken wings, fried eggs, or crispy potatoes—and it’s equally good swirled into a marinade. Try it alongside your next roast chicken, or, acceptable in these times, mixed into a dip with some ketchup for roasted potato wedges or delivery chicken tenders.
You can find a pretty good tub of gochujang in many stores for about $10, but my favorite comes from Kisoondo, a tenth-generation family operation using only traditional ingredients and techniques.
Kisoondo Gochujang
$22.00, Gotham Grove
Preserved Lemons
Preserved lemons are the bright and briny backbone to many of the best Middle Eastern and Mediterranean dishes. You can easily make them yourself by cramming slightly sliced whole lemons and tons of salt into a jar, then patiently waiting a couple of weeks until the skin and pith are soft—an excellent quarantine craft to flex now that everybody is tired of sourdough. But there's no shame in indulging in a jar of already-preserved Moroccan lemons.
Either way, you’re in for a treat. The whole pieces can be roughly chopped and roasted alongside fresh fish or bulbs of fennel or just slapped onto a now-luxe chicken sandwich. Never throw away the leftover, pulpy liquid–mix it with yogurt and garlic and eat it as a dip, or use a drop in your cocktail shaker for a subtle swerve on dirty martini.
Preserved Lemons
$12.00, Amazon
Originally Appeared on GQ
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