Umami Squared

When you were a kid, did you ever think to yourself: Hmmm, I love blackberries with cream. And I love salami lathered in mustard. I bet they would be amazing together. Which of course, they weren’t. But that’s not the point. Part of the wonderment of childhood is experimentation, and the heart of experimentation is the curiosity that comes from “what if.”

I go there often in my soul food kitchen.

The question, posed a bit more artfully but not less naively in adulthood, is simply this: What if I take one absolute perfect blend of tastes and meld it to another, also perfectly blended? Would I have double the pleasure? Or would one negate the other?

The latest round of this philosophizing started innocently enough: I was making a simple ginger/scallion sauce made famous by David Chang. It takes 5 minutes and is absolutely brilliant, especially on noodles, which serve as a bit of calm background tapestry to this riotous sauce. I didn’t have any noodles handy at the moment. And I really wanted to dig into the sauce. What to mix it with?

I looked in the fridge and all I could come up with was our tchina, itself just a brilliant blend of salt, sweet, sour, spicy, and well umami. What, I wondered, would two umami dishes taste like blended together?

Before I go any further, I want to confess that this is a “Lady or the Tiger” moment, meaning I’m going to lead you up to the edge of the dilemma but leave you short of the reveal. You will have to try it for yourself. But short of actually trying this particular blend of two amazing dishes, step back for a minute and ask yourself what perfection blended with perfection is likely to yield. Is is true that opposites attract? Or do sameness-es also create mutual enhancements?