Sauces

Sauces are an important complement to dim sum. There are two generic sauce types we use with dim sum around our house, sweet and savory. The sweet sauce is almost always a sweet chili sauce, here it's Mae Ploy brand. I do like plain "duck sauce" too, or whatever one calls the slightly fruit based sweet sauce used with appetizers, but I like the little added spark of chili. It's not really very hot, though, usually. This particular brand is not super exciting to me, I find the chili bits a little too tough without much benefit. The savory sauce of choice is a vegetarian take on "oyster" sauce, here Vegetarian Mushroom Flavored Sauce by Coin Tree. This is a salty, thick brown sauce. Not hoisin sauce. Thinner than that, and no real flavor besides salty and umami. This particular one is actually quite good. It's a little thinner and lighter in flavor than many I've had, and actually went really well on the radish cakes. I'm not going to rate them properly, I just wanted to show you my typical sauce array!