miso alterations

I've been thinking around this miso salad dressing thing. the recipe calls for 3 Tbs of sugar, which is, I think, a hugely huge amount. I suggested reducing that to 2 Tbs. Part of the reason I said this was because it was so gritty with the sugar at first, but all that sugar did end up dissolving overnight. Regardless, that's still a lot of refined sugar for what is generally considered a healthy meal: salad.

I was reading this month's cooking light magazine and it was talking about balancing flavors, the four (now five) tastes on your tongue, which got me thinking, maybe the dressing has all that sugar to try to balance out the Salt of the miso and the soy sauce? The recipe calls for sugar, so that's Sweet. Miso and soy sauce aren't just Salty, they're also something new called Umami. I don't really understand Umami, but it's found in things like tomatoes, hard cheeses, mushrooms.... read the article if interested. Anyway, those are the three main flavors going on. I guess if you eat it with a lettuce like radicchio or endive or cabbage, that would give you Bitter (although it's unlikely I personally would ever eat those in a salad). And you do add vinegar to the dressing, but mirin is really more sweet than anything else; it's not your classic Sour.

So that got me thinking, the main problem here is the salad dressing is way Salty. What if we reduce the amount of the soy sauce, and add some "real" vinegar instead, like, I don't know, white wine vinegar. That might cut the salt enough to allow us to reduce the sugar without the dressing being nothing but salty and umami, whatever that is. I'll try it once I run out of this batch of dressing and keep you posted.

By the way, this article also explained that this is why you need to add some sugar to a vinaigrette that has more vinegar than oil, as these new low fat vinaigrettes have.