use of mirin,sake and other sauces like hoisin, worcestershire sauces in baby food.

jaseka · #1 (**permalink**) 24-10-10, 21:00

My child is 18 mos old.please can anyone tell me if it is safe to use alcoholic ingredients like mirin etc and synthetic sauces . what is the other alternative to mirin.
thx

DrP · #2 (**permalink**) 24-10-10, 22:56

There should be no problem using alcohol ingredients like wine, mirin, saki etc as long as you cook the dish long enough to cook off any alcohol that it contains.

As for synthetic sauces, I assume you mean shop bought sauces. You just need to make sure that the salt / sugar content is not too high.

jaseka · #3 (**permalink**) 25-10-10, 14:10

In top 100 pasta dishes, teriyaki sauce calls for use of 4tbs of mirin.... and cooking time is only 2 min. i still dont know if the use of mirin is justifiable.please do give me an alternative to this ingr. also is the use of all kinds of vinegar like rice vinegar, balsamic etc ok?

DrP · #4 (**permalink**) 25-10-10, 20:59

I don't know the recipe, but if you don't feel the cooking time is long enough then just cook it for longer. Alcohol has a low boiling / evaporation temperature so it really doesn't take that long to cook it out of a dish. The reason behind using mirin is probably because of the authentic flavour it adds to the dish. I cook chinese a fair bit and many of my recipes call for rice wine and I don't worry about using it.

No idea what you can use instead of mirin. It's a sweet rice wine so maybe apple or grape juice and a little sugar would work instead if you really don't want to use it. You could always just boil up the mirin on it's own first to cook off the alcohol then add it.

I dont' think there is any problem with using vinegars. We use them all here all the time. I found that once my LO was over 1 he ate pretty much what we were eating all the time. I used and still use all the recipes I would usually cook for ourselves. The only difference I made was to watch the salt content so I used lo salt stock cubes, didn't season much or at all with salt as I was cooking and that was about it.

jaseka · #5 (**permalink**) 26-10-10, 13:18

Thx a lot . That sure was comforting to know atleast i can safely use vinegar.Most of Ak recipes also calls for rice vine vinegar....... i dont know if rice vinegar and rice vine vinegar are the same but i would now use japanese rice vinegar and substitute mirin for sugar OR maybe omit it.(Does alcohol burn off in cooking?). This web page says it takes a full 3 hrs for alcohol from food to evaporate. so i guess, for me its a "no go" to Mirin