On Nov 17, 2004, at 1:36, Patty Dowden wrote:
This rang bells in my head. I had some mango tapioca at a Chinese restaurant and while it was appealing, it seemed to lack body or to be
"watery". I added salt and the flavor rounded out and was simply smashing. American sweets have a good deal of salt, oriental sweets typically do not.
Salty black beans may be just the ticket (in the right proportion).
Just a thought. . .
I'll leave it there - as a thought. Considered, and rejected :)
American sweets do, indeed, have a lot of salt... :) I look at the recipes - a handful of salt, a bucket of soda/baking powder to make the confection "fairy light", and two barrels of sugar to counteract the bitter tastes of both... "Subtle" is a suspect word not only in politics, but in cooking as well...
Y'all kill all natural flavour with the excess of salt... Even your *butter* is salted; something I encountered in Poland *once*... In '81 (I was visitng), Poland was in dire straights, and importing as much food as it could. Some of the help came from Holland, in the form of salted butter... And, just as we tossed the UNRRA-gifted processed cheese against the ceiling (to see how long it would stick there) when I was a teenager (in the early 60ties), so did all Poles refuse to buy salted butter in the 80ties... Living without is preferable to an unpalatable compromise (had Bush asked me, before he invaded Iraq, I could have told him <g>), especially when your stomach's enzymes have not prepared you for a radical change...
To this day, I only use salted butter in baking in moderation (and *never* to grease the pan). If I use it at all, it replaces *any thought* of adding salt... You say that "oriental sweets typically have no salt". Neither do Polish ones, which is why I can can bond with my Chinese stepdaughter-in-law (who'd learnt cooking from her father - an owner of several NYCity restaurants). We both sit and snigger at our American relatives who bring their salt-shovels to the table the way the French used to bring their flea-hammers before the Revolution...
Geez...
--- Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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