As a white dude whose cooking skills stem almost entirely from. tv (Yan Can Cook!) and YouTube, I know that my various attempts at Asian-inspired cooking took a pretty good step forward when I began to understand that adding sugar does not necessarily meant explicit sweetness.
Much like salt makes things taste more like themselves, some sugar seems to ‘round out’ many dishes, providing a counterpoint to sourness and caramelization adding all those umami/maillard reaction, “brown” flavors.
