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The Sublime Combination of Butter and Soy

Credit...Christina Holmes for The New York Times; Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Deborah Williams.

Who knows who first mixed soy sauce and butter and discovered the pleasures the combination provides. Try the mixture on warm white rice, a steaming pile of greens or an old sneaker — regardless, the taste is a sublime velvet of sweet and salty, along with a kind of pop the cognoscenti call umami, a fifth taste beyond bitter, sour, salty and sweet. Soy butter provides warmth and luxury, elegance without pomp. It raises recipes to heights almost indescribable in the telling.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten cooks thin steaks sautéed in butter with a hit of soy and a shower of ginger. Wolfgang Puck sends out hors d’oeuvres at weddings he caters: beef satay with a spicy sauce thick with butter and soy. Roy Choi cooks an easy version: instant ramen amped up with pats of butter and a whisper of soy, some sesame seeds and a few slices of American cheese. Don’t judge. This is Nirvana on a budget, a night-before-payday feast.

Chris Jaeckle, the chef at the new restaurant All’onda, in Manhattan’s West Village, mixes soy and butter with mushroom stock to pour over polenta and sautéed mushrooms, with a dusting of grated, miso-aged egg yolk over the top. At the restaurant it is served as a side dish of great distinction. At home, on one of these endless winter nights when it seems impossible to stay warm, it makes for a dinner of great comfort.

Some stipulations: First, miso-aged egg yolk has no place in a home kitchen, no matter how cool it looks and tastes. (Though if you must, here are Jaeckle’s instructions: Blend some yolks,“then pour them into plastic tubes. Freeze ’em, push them out of the tube and submerge in miso paste for a week. Then dehydrate overnight. Micro-plane over top.” Unlikely!) Also, feel free to use the plain-Jane soy sauce in your pantry instead of something fancy. As Jaeckle says: “I use Kikkoman all over the restaurant. It’s there for a reason.”

Finally, at All’onda, Jaeckle uses a mixture of gellan and xanthan gums to provide structure and stability to his sauce. At home you can rely instead on a touch of cream and olive oil. (I tried a slurry of cornstarch for one version, which thickened the sauce well enough but gave it an unfortunate plastic glossiness.)

To start, simply rehydrate some dried porcinis in hot water, then drain them and save the stock. Meanwhile, make polenta. Jaeckle’s advice on the subject is by his own admission a little vague — “I really believe in cooking, not just following recipes,” he told me. But he delivered wisdom all the same, in the form of a 5:2 ratio of water to milk in the cooking liquid that provides a real lightness to the resulting porridge, which you can flavor with butter, mascarpone and Parmesan to taste. One admonition: Make sure to pour the dry cornmeal into the boiling liquid carefully, whisking all the while to avoid clumps.

To finish the dish, sauté some garlic and butter in a pan and add the rehydrated mushrooms along with some freshly sliced ones. Flavor the mushrooms with thyme leaves, and allow the mixture to go brown and crisp in the heat. Deglaze the pan with a hearty splash of the reserved mushroom stock, and allow the liquid to reduce. Then turn down the heat, whisk in some more butter and — here comes the magic — the soy sauce, followed by a little cream and olive oil to help stabilize the whole. The result will thicken slightly and take on a deep satin brown.

Pour the mushrooms and the sauce on top of the polenta in a warm bowl and serve for dinner in advance of a crisp salad. There is a great line passed around among people who write about food: There are really only 11 recipes in the whole world. This one ought to be one of them.

Recipe: Polenta With Mushrooms and Soy

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 45 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Fifth Flavor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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