Cooking With Sake

Video Transcript

"I'm Beau Timken, Master Sake Sommelier. In this segment we're talking about Ginjo Sake, the category. A lot of times people will come to me and say, "hey, can I cook with my Ginjo sake, or my Junmai or my Daiginjo." Now what I like to say is cooking with sake is a good idea, but cooking with a premium sake is pretty much a bad idea. You really, you're not enhancing the flavor by adding the better brew. In fact, it would be absolutely sort of the opposite, specifically for Ginjo and Daiginjo sake. I just don't recommend it at all because you're basically wasting a good sake to kind of get the hints of rice and water in whatever dish you're trying to do. Now there are different cooking sakes out there. One being called Median which is a very sweet, very fat, very bulky sake. I've had great success in cooking with Honjozo sake, which is kind of ricey and it's the Junmai, quote, unquote category, but it has distilled alcohol added to it, so I enjoy that. In a book that I wrote we do a recipe, sake steamed clams. So when you think of cooking with wine, just overlay that with cooking with sake. It has the far same principals, stands up to heat as well, and if you want a different flavor than kind of like a fruit flavor, a great flavor if you want kind of a starchy embellishment, then I would recommend cooking with sake. But don't throw a higher priced brew at it. It's just not worth it. Now that said, if you've had a bottle that's been in your refrigerator open for nine months and you think it's a little bit groddy, then go ahead and cook with that. I'm sure great flavor components will come out of it. In Japan when you polish sake, when you mill the rice, when you press it, at the end there's something called kasu that comes out. Sake kasu. This kasu is the pressed unfermented rice particles. And what they do is they'll make soup stocks out of that, by all means. And it's great. You can cook it and braise it and it's really tasty. That said when you mill rice, when you polish rice, specifically Ginjo, dye Ginjo rice, when you're removing forty percent, what do you do with that? Well you leave that. You take that stuff and you give it to confectionaries to make pastries out of or picklers and they ferment with it. Or even the lower grade stuff that you can give to pig farmers and they feed the pigs with it. My point is if you're going to cook with sake, don't cook with a high priced Ginjo unless you know it's off."