This is another in my collection of “not quite right” non-recipes. Make of it what you will.
Had no hoisin sauce, and nor did I have all the ingredients to whip up a batch, so I decided to wing it and approximate something in the neighborhood of a hoisin sauce. . . sort of.
What I did:
Combined:
- 4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce (because I had only a smidgin’ of soy sauce on hand)–This is the single most significant departure.
- 1 tablespoon peanut butter (‘cos I had no soy paste or black bean paste on hand and didn’t want to hassle with cooking some black beans, making paste, etc.)
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup (cos I’m out of honey and my molasses is reserved for other things)
- 2 teaspoons white vinegar
- One garlic clove, minced
- 1/8 teaspoon onion powder (I don’t usually use onion powder, but it works for this)
- 2 teaspoons olive oil (right: out of sesame oil)
- About 2 tablespoons of Melinda’s Jalapeño Ketchup (better than just a few drops of hot sauce, IMO)
- About “8 grinds” of black pepper
- 5 prunes. Just because.
. . .in food processor until smooth. Pretty good. Not “real” hoisin sauce, but it’s usable as a substitute, IMO, so. . . I used it in a crockpot five-spice pork recipe. (Yeh, there were more ingredients in the recipe I needed this for, like a 2.5lb pork roast, a couple of teaspoons of five-spice, some apple cider, the soy sauce I had on hand, a large onion, quartered and pieced out, and some carrots and potatoes dumped on top of the whole thing. Woulda included some celery stalks, but I forgot I had ’em. *shrugs* At least I left the kitchen sink out.)
TH
he only thing I’d do differently would be to change the order of loading in the veggies. Carrots on bottom, onions and then potatoes. That way, the potatoes wouldn’t soak up quite as much of the liquids/seasonings. Other than that, 12 hours on low produced a really, really delicious pork (shredded for “sammiches”–it just fell apart) and the potatoes, onions and carrots were very tasty.