Mirin: Japanese cooking rice wine (みりん)

ne late student night last century, in a Nagoya neighbourhood my mates and yours truly ran out of beer. Somebody suggested drinking mirin and, as intended, caused a massive brouhaha.

These days mirin (みりん), mildly alcoholic (14%) syrup is used exclusively for cooking. No one would think of drinking it. However, some 200 years ago, in Edo Period, mirin was a fancy booze. If you try it, you will understand why. For a cooking wine it tastes quite nice, rather like low-alcohol muscat. Mirin-based herbal liquors like toso (屠蘇) and yomeishu (養命酒) still have some currency in Japan but no one has yet thought of marketing them abroad as a novel Oriental drink.

As it has quite a particular flavour you can't just substitute it with white wine and sugar (although you can try!). Mirin is absolutely essential for cooking such Japanese classics as unagi-don or teriyaki sauce.

To avoid paying the alcohol tax on mirin sales, there are two close substitutes in the market: shio-mirin (塩みりん) with 1.5% added salt that supposedly makes it unquaffable and mirin-fu (みりん風調味料, on the picture above), which tastes the same but only contains 1% of alcohol. It may take quite in effort to buy real stuff, hon-mirin　(本みりん), abroad, but the substitutes are actually not that bad at all.

As thanks for reading this far, here I will reveal Japanese housewives' little secret: marinade of equal shares of mirin, sake and shoyu enhances the taste of white fish without interfering with its flavour. Just soak fish filets for half an hour and cook as usual.