Homemade Hoisin Sauce (low-carb)

Peggy

Mar 23

I made some Moo Shu Pork for dinner tonight. We love the stuff! But I needed some Hoisin Sauce to go with it and had none in the pantry. Readers had been asking me to create this sauce low-carb, but just now am getting around to it. All the commercial Hoisin sauce either has sugar, high fructose corn syrup or molasses in the ingredient listing. I checked my several recipes for this sauce (gathered around the net over the past 9 years) and the only two I had actually tried before were annotated "not so good" and "nothing special". :{

So I set about creating my own instead. Hoisin sauce is used in making/serving Peking Duck and as a condiment for famous Moo Shu Pork rolls. Since Hoisin is basically a seasoned, slightly sweet and salty fermented soy bean/plum sauce, and I had an open bag of no-sugar-added prunes in my pantry, I finally got around to filling the long-time request of my readers to develop a low-carb version of this famous sauce. I started with 10 dried prunes as my base. Then I added a few store-bought ingredients mention on commercial labels of the sauce, cutting carb "corners" and guessing the amounts for those ingredients to derive the correct taste.

Well, I'm here to tell you my final sauce came out pretty darn good! Not exactly like the high-molasses stuff right out of the jar at the store, but it gets much better and closer to that flavor when it has "aged" a bit. We ate it while it was still warm and it was considerably milder than I would have liked. The anise (licorice flavor) in the Chinese 5-Spice Powder was pretty pronounced but the bean paste, not so much. Those flavors mellow and develop in just 24 hours, getting considerably better in a week. All in all, not bad for my first shot at a low-carb version of this essential Chinese condiment. Most commercial hoisin sauce has around 8 carbs per tablespoon, so this number is trimmed down considerably with my recipe. Using liquid Splenda lowers carbs a tad, but not very much. A couple weeks later, the sauce had aged quite nicely in flavor, so the key is letting it age before using.

I'll post the Moo Shu Pork recipe later today. I have been cooking with Gloria Bley-Miller's marvelous cookbook The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook as my "Bible" for Chinese cooking. I can cook Moo Shu pork blindfolded but must be sure to have dried tiger lily buds and dried cloud ear fungus hand to have this tasty treat.

This sauce is suitable once you get to Phase 2 of Atkins, since it is used in such small amounts on the "pancake" (low-carb flour tortilla) that you will use to roll up the Moo Shu Pork. This sauce is totally unsuitable for Primal or Paleo due to the soy beans, as all legumes are eschewed in those food plans. Sauce should keep a long time in a jar in the refrigerator. Mine is now 3 months old and it smells/tastes just fine.

INGREDIENTS:

10 large dried prunes (4 oz.), no sugar added

½ c. water

1 T. rice wine vinegar

3 T. low-sodium soy sauce (dark soy sauce if available)

¼ tsp. Chinese 5-Spice powder

1 tsp. molasses

3 T. Splenda or few drops of liquid sweetener of choice

2 T. Eden soy black beans, rinsed & mashed smooth

DIRECTIONS: Place prunes in small saucepan with about ½ c. tap water. Bring to boil, lower heat and simmer until they are soft, or about 5 minutes. Mash well into the water with a fork until pretty smooth. You can puree in a blender or food processor if you like, but is difficult to do with such a small amount. Remove from heat.

Mash the beans on a paper plate to as smooth a paste as possible and stir into the prune mixture. Add vinegar, soy sauce and 5-Spice powder to the pot and stir well. Spoon into a lidded jar and store if in your refrigerator for a week. I do not know how long this keeps yet, and it sure has no preservatives in it. But since it's just made from basically dried fruit, vinegar and sugar ( preservatives naturally) with some soy sauce (fermented), I suspect a pretty long time. Just don't know yet. The soy beans will be what spoils first in this combo. I'll try to remember to post back my findings on that when mine no longer seems to smell/look right to me and I toss it out. UPDATE: Lasted about one month for me in the refrigerator.