Miso Glaze

I bought a package of light-colored miso recently and made miso soup, which tasted like the miso soup you get in restaurants. A little miso goes a long way, so I've been looking for ways to use it besides in soup.

At Philadelphia's Morimoto, and here at Pittsburgh's Umi, I've had delicious miso-glazed black cod, also called sable, or sablefish. A little web research found that the glaze is easy to produce:

You blend miso with sugar, rice vinegar and sake. Heat it, and stir to melt the sugar and cook off the alcohol in the wine. I skipped the sake (since I didn’t have it on hand), and the finished dish was very good.

The goal is to produce a sweet, slightly smoky, sticky glaze on whatever you’re cooking. I used wild salmon from Trader Joe’s.

Miso glazed salmon

Mix ¼ cup sugar, ¼ cup miso, ¼ cup rice vinegar, and ¼ cup sake in pan and heat, stirring to dissolve ingredients. Let cool to room temperature.

Marinate salmon (or any firm fish or crustacean) in miso mixture for a minimum of a few hours.

Pre-heat broiler to high. Remove salmon from miso mix and scrape off excess marinade.

Broil under a high heat until fish is cooked to medium and glaze has melted onto the fish, two-to-three minutes, depending on the strength of your broiler. No need to turn the fish.

I failed to get my broiler hot enough. While the glaze eventually melted, the fish had cooked through by the time this had occured. It tasted fine, though missed the tender juiciness of a nice medium rare or medium piece of salmon.

Next up: miso glazed scallops, with some sesame snow peas would be pretty tasty, no? I may even spring for some sake.