Hoisin sauce

A sweet, salty, dark paste

Hoisin (海鮮醬, hǎixiān jiàng) is a thick, dark Chinese condiment that is sweet and salty at once. Its base is fermented soybean paste, softened with sugar and starch, and lifted with garlic, spices, sesame and chilli. It is a cooking sauce and a table sauce: brushed on meat before it is roasted, spooned beside duck pancakes, stirred into noodle soups.

The name literally means seafood sauce in Cantonese, but the sauce contains no seafood. A culinary reference calls the origin of the name unclear, and no source consulted dates the sauce or names its birthplace. It should not be confused with sweet bean sauce or sweet bean paste (tianmianjiang), a related but different sauce.

What is in the jar

Commercial hoisin is made to market-specific formulas. The ingredients of a Canada-market Lee Kum Kee jar run: sugar, water, fermented soybean paste (itself water, salt, soybeans and wheat flour), salt, sweet potato powder, caramel, modified corn starch, sesame paste, dehydrated garlic, spices, salted chilli peppers, acetic acid and a red colour. The label gives no quantities and no process. The same maker's Singapore product lists fermented soy paste, sugar, sweet-potato starch, sesame paste, garlic, spices and salted chilli, and its China-market product adds red fermented bean curd.

These are labels, not a traditional recipe, and nothing in them says the finished sauce is fermented again. The fermentation sits in the soybean paste, which the maker buys or produces separately. Allergens follow the formula: the Canada jar declares soybeans, wheat and sesame, while the Australian product declares soy and sesame and is marked gluten free. Check the package in your hand.

A quick version at home

No traditional from-scratch method with fermentation controls and batch quantities turned up in the sources consulted, so this page records the one home version that was read in full. It is a shortcut: light soy sauce, natural peanut butter, honey, rice vinegar, sesame oil, grated garlic and black pepper, with a small spoon of ready-made fermented paste. Everything is stirred together in a bowl, and the batch makes about half a cup.

The author is open about what the shortcut cannot do. Real hoisin takes its flavour from fermented beans, which common pantry spices do not reproduce, so the recipe leans on a fermented or chilli paste for that depth. In her tests miso and doubanjiang (spicy fermented broad bean paste) came closest to the store-bought sauce; gochujang with five spice, and Thai chilli sauce with five spice, were the other tested options, and all four gave satisfying results. The peanut butter stands in for the sesame paste and starch that body a commercial sauce, and readers suggest almond butter or tahini where peanut is a problem, which the author did not test.

How it is used

The Woks of Life describes hoisin with Cantonese barbecue, with Peking duck in Beijing, and in the Chinese-American dish moo shu, and notes its use with Vietnamese phở. Its char siu recipe marinates pork in retail hoisin. A marinade that contains hoisin is a dish, not a way of making the sauce, so it is not described here as a method.

The home version is also used in marinades and glazes. Because it is a fresh blend with garlic and nut butter, it is made in small amounts.

Keeping it

The recipe card says to keep the sauce in an airtight jar in the refrigerator for up to a month. In a reply to a reader the author wrote that a week or so is fine and that freezing works. The two statements differ, so the shorter one is the safer. Neither is a tested shelf life, and the storage statements printed on commercial jars apply to those products and packages only.