It’s pretty un-like me to toot the horn of my Asian peoples, but I have to hand it to them, they are geniuses when it comes to using beans. Some times, you even forget that the famous soy sauce, all that liquid umami, is made from fermenting soy beans. Then there’s black bean sauce, also a fermented bean, which is responsible for dishes like Clams in Black Bean Sauce. The Bomb! Lesser known ones like ground bean paste, sweet bean paste, broad bean paste, and more, fill my mom’s pantry. Who would have thought to make all these great sauces from beans? Well, thank goodness somebody did, because they are all vital in a Chinese kitchen.
