The Sublime Combination of Butter and Soy
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/magazine/the-sublime-combination-of-butter-and-soy.html?hp