Miso Madness
Edition 1 of Vegemite in My Congee feat. miso and the wild world of 食材平替 (ingredient substitution)
Vegemite in My Congee is back for 2022, on a semi-monthly basis. Featuring a round up of monthly reads ranging from food stories to wacky-timeline fillers and recipes force-fed by the algorithm that keeps the best of us awake with 3am cravings. Scroll to the end for a few writing opportunities for this month.
Starters
snippets, musings and flavours from the past month
Chaoyang Tarp blew my mind with making youtiao with pizza dough.
Eric Kim’s microwaved steamed eggs made me reconsider my relationship with my wok-steamer set up.
Read Michelle Kuo’s insightful and introspective mediation on the relationship of the diaspora with “home”, returning to “Asia”, the trials of marriage on A Broad and Ample Road.
Main
a deep-dive into my inventory of ingredients, tools and musings for the month
My one second search for “miso soup” became a one month hostile takeover of my timeline.
Miso caramel. Miso pasta. Miso mac and cheese. Miso banana bread.
I craved miso soup at two am, but was too lazy to go through the usual motions of boiling water, adding dashi, and patiently dissolving miso paste into a pot full of tofu, seaweed and mushrooms.
So, in a fit of genius spurred by the kind of logic reserved for that in-between place between 2 am and sleep, I dissolved miso paste into a cup of boiled water from the kettle.
Did a quick google to make sure that I wasn’t committing myself to a morning on the loo.
(spoiler: I was fine)
Substituting ingredients in the interests of convenience (or laziness) or as a result of circumstance is not new. Chaoyang Tarp’s brilliant edition on “Ingredient Substitution (食材平替)” recap of the phenomenon in China really opened my eyes to the true potential (and genius) of ingredient substitution- from using pizza dough for youtiao and xiangbing, to sauerkraut as a substitute for suancai.
(enough for me to briefly consider a costco membership)
I’m no stranger to ingredient substitution. I’ve chopped and changed some of my favourite dishes in the name of comfort, or laziness. I’ve used vegemite as a substitute for soy sauce in fried rice (not recommended), pasta for my niu rou mien (passable), mayonnaise for sour cream (again, not recommended), and a variety of dried condiments as substitute for bay leaves (again testing my scepticism re: what the hell do bay leaves actually add to a dish).
I even used up my miso paste this week by stirring it into some carrot soup as a substitution for stock (passable, not recommended).
“Method substitution” often goes hand in hand with “ingredient substitution” of sorts. Think of the steady diet of “college student friendly meals”, “15 minute dinner hacks” and “one pot pastas” on youtube. A corollary to the ways technology has changed the way we cook, relate and prepare food - from the simple, like a gas stove, to the complex (air fryers, sous vide machines).
In doing so, it cuts across the “process” that I was taught when learning to cook at home. Home cooking for me, was an imprecise science based on one’s senses, blunt repetition and a lot of “agak agak” followed by a shrug. The rice cooker was filled and measured “by the knuckle”, time was counted by the “number of bubbles” and the perfect “low-simmer” was achieved by balancing a saucepan lid across two chopsticks.
“Home cooking” required time, patience and an implicit understanding that “there was a certain way” to do things.
The fact that the results were imperfect - kueh that was too soft, over-proofed puffs and scrambled eggs rather than steamed eggs - only made the eventual success much more satisfying. These little triumphs marked the passing of each week and year. Summer was watermelon juice, cold noodles and mango pudding. Soaking bamboo leaves for zong zi meant Dragon Boat Festival was upon us. Waking up on weekends to broths bubbling away in oversized saucepans, their outsides darkened with soot, announced Winter. Handmade kueh was a signal for an upcoming celebration or birthday- particularly special if the ang ku kueh moulds were brought out. Steamed egg remained a steady weekly classic, alongside pork mince with tofu.
(I write this, acknowledging the privilege I have had, in being able to grow up in a household where we had the resources, time and security to prioritise home-cooking).
The advent of all this new technology allows traditions, these patterns of behaviour we use to anchor our understanding of self, to evolve and change was we do. We can make steamed eggs in the microwave now, no longer having to fiddle with the heat of the wok or worry about the tilt of the bamboo steamer. Broths no longer need to be simmered for hours or skimmed carefully hour by hour on Sunday afternoons thanks to the instant pot.
I mean, even mum (who practically dictated that the perfect steamed eggs could only be achieved using a very specific metal bowl suspended over a rolling boil) was not immune to the thermomix trend (it chops, cooks and STEAMS at the same time).
Simon expresses it much more eloquently in Chaoyang Tarp:
“In one sense Xiaoshongshu substitution cooking might just be the latest iteration of a longer process of the adaptation of food (foodways?) through immigration, itself speaking to the specificities of current patterns of migration. Subbing sauerkraut for suancai sounds fairly similar to the types of improvisation that created Chinese-American food. What might be different now is the class of the people doing this cooking, and, for some of them, the temporary nature of their sojourns outside of China.”
That’s all to say, my miso soup “hack” falls far short of this level of ingenuity and escapes any deep or meaningful reflection on the adaption of foodways. “Its the same thing,” I reasoned to my friend mid-Tuesday night, after the laptop had gone to shit and the week felt like a sadistic Truman Show-esque torture ritual.
Her non-committal laugh was a testament to her loyalty to our friendship, rather than any form of approval of my 2am bastardised miso “cup-a-soup”.
Dessert
shoutouts, recipes and general timeline fillers
The list of miso based things that inspired this month’s main see:
Miso pasta from NY times and brekkyattiffanys
Miso banana bread from two plaid aprons
Miso mac and cheese from cammienoodle
Since writing this, I’ve come to learn that I am not alone in the miso paste+boiling water from the kettle team (see from 13:14 onwards):
A huge thank you to Lee Tran Lam for her interview on DIFMA and for her generous tips and guidance on all things food writing and podcasting!
Takeaways
submissions, events, pitches and opportunities to check out
Centre for Stories have 6 x $10,000 writing fellowships available to emerging Western Australian writers who identify as First Nations and/or a Person of Colour - apply by 23 April
Liminal and Cordite Poetry Review are seeking poems by Asian Australian writers - entries close 24 April
Sign up for Jinghua Qian’s workshop for trans/nonbinary/gender diverse folks starting out in the creative industries
Mirror are looking for submissions for their mentorship program for 2022. 1 year mentorship program with financial support, networking opportunities, and webinars for artists who come from historically marginalised communities developing literary work for children and young people (0-14 years) for publication in English and in languages other than English
Thanks for reading!
Vegemite in My Congee is a monthly newsletter by Ange Yang (she/her). You can find more of her work here, and get in contact via instagram on @vegemitecongee.
001 Miso Madness
002 The Wok (tbc)