Five Japanese ingredients that go well in pasta sauce

You may not know this, but Italian food is reasonably popular in Japan. You can find Italian restaurants at various price ranges, you can find pasta in every super market (although you may have a limited selection of noodles) and Japan even has its own Italian-inspired pasta dishes. However, while people here will substitute button mushrooms for other local varieties and do interesting things with pasta like add tobasco sauce to pasta, it doesn't seem like people mix ingredients that are traditional to Japanese cooking into their pasta sauces very often.

This is something that daid and I have been doing at home though and we've had largely positive results. For the most part, we've just been using diced tomatoes as the base for our sauces because it's generally easier to find and cheaper than pasta sauce, but lately we've also tried making some Alfredo sauce (which is surprisingly easy). So I present you with a list of five ingredients that go in pasta sauces reasonably well.

Tofu

This one probably isn't much of a surprise for anyone who is vegetarian or knows a vegetarian, but here it's apparently an odd combination. This one works in a few forms. You can get the soft kind and crumble it or a hard kind and cube it, sautee it and it's good. It works especially well in tomato sauce and I think the best way is to go with cubed pieces, honestly.

Soy Sauce

Soy sauce adds not only a bit of salt, but it also has a nice savoury taste. This can be added while sauteeing vegetables or after adding the tomato. If you go with some soy sauce, you probably want to skip the salt (or add less). You probably also want to avoid this one with an Alfredo sauce unless you want it to come out brown.

Miso

This fermented soy paste is typically suspended in soup, but it also works surprisingly well in pasta sauces. Like soy sauce, it adds salty and savoury flavours and it compliments both red and white sauces. For an Alfredo sauce, a white miso (which might not exist outside of Japan) is generally best, but for tomato sauce any kind will do. This one probably also shouldn't be used in conjunction with the soy sauce unless you really like salt though.

Wakame

Wakame is a type of seaweed which is cut into small pieces and is typically sold dried. In North America, one can typically find this ingredient in miso soups, but here it makes an appearance in other soups and salads as well. It also works really well in a tomato sauce. One can just think of it as another leafy green vegetable.

However, unlike most leafy green vegetables, this one comes dried and requires rehydration. This can be accomplished by pre-soaking the wakame or simply putting it in the pan early and giving it enough time to absorb moisture from the other ingredients.

Black Sesame Seeds

These are a bit more subtle than the others, but they make for a slightly nutty addition to tomato-based pasta sauces. These can be added while everything is being cooked, but they could probably also work reasonably well sprinkled on afterwards.