San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area chefs’ love affair with XO sauce
Umamirich sauce swept menus, and now you can make your own
Powerfully aromatic and jampacked with umami, XO sauce can make an otherwise plain bowl of rice feel like a special occasion.
No wonder the Cantonese sauce has captured the attention of so many Bay Area chefs, who were using it more and more leading up to the Bay Area’s shelterinplace order. We saw it tossed with turmeric noodles at Azalina’s, chefowner Azalina Eusope’s casual MidMarket spot; served with quail at Benu, San Francisco’s threestarred Michelin restaurant; and nestled against a sorrelwrapped scallop at Michelin twostarred Lazy Bear in the Mission.
Now, it’s a rewarding weekend project for home cooks.
XO is a relatively new sauce, invented in Hong Kong in the 1980s as a delicious status symbol. It traditionally contains Chinese ham, dried shrimp and dried scallops; the latter is a particularly pricey ingredient that can easily run $100 per pound. Those proteins are fried in lots of oil with shallots, garlic and chiles, but recipes and results vary wildly. Some XO sauces are dry and chunky, others are wet and smooth. Some recipes call for cooking the ingredients all together, others in stages.
Those discrepancies might be because the process to make XO is so unusual, and Chinese cooking techniques are often misunderstood, said Brandon Jew, chefowner of Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco.
“There’s nothing really to compare it to,” he said. “There’s not a pasta sauce kind of like it or a mother sauce in the French arsenal that’s anywhere close to how this sauce is built.”
Before temporarily closing Mister Jiu’s because of the coronavirus, Jew regularly made multiple kinds of XO at the restaurant, partly because the nature of the sauce allows for a lot of creativity. He’s tried using dried abalone and geoduck for the seafood component, and fennel salami and chorizo for the pork ingredient. Over time, though, he returned to the classic ingredients, using seafood he brines, steams and then dehydrates to control where his ingredients come from and achieve the right texture for the sauce.
“I look for the textures to be represented individually,” he said. “I’m looking for the small dice of ham, the strands of scallop, the little bites of shrimp.”
Martin Salata, the executive chef at Sister in Oakland, started experimenting with XO because he saw it mentioned in cookbooks and articles with increasing frequency. It sounded like a fun way to heighten the umami quotient of his Californian fare.
“Instead of using as much salt as possible, we’re understanding that using a bit of umami raises the level of flavor,” he said.
At Sister, he’d take a liberal, CalItalian approach to the sauce, using prosciutto, Calabrian chile, Sherry vinegar and green garlic juice to give it depth. When adding his XO to lamb ribs or garlic noodles, he thought of it as a vinaigrette, lightly bathing the dish in an elusive savoriness.
If you make his version of the sauce at home, try tossing it with noodles or steamed vegetables, spooning it over cubes of panfried tofu or using it as a final flourish for fried rice.
Some chefs are more daring with XO. At San Francisco’s Angler, Joshua Skenes would age radicchio leaves and crispy alliums over a fire for several weeks to make his famed version. There’s no pork or seafood in the sauce at all.
Salata appreciates examples like the radicchio XO that show just how far the sauce can go. But for Jew, there is such a thing as going too far.
“The older I get,” he said, “the more I think we sometimes have to be careful of how we use these dishes that have meaning, that have names, that have tradition behind them.”