Don’t let those cheap Chinese Food take-out packets fool you. Good soy sauce is brewed like beer, aged like fine wine and is as mold intensive as the smelliest French cheese.
The difference between cheap soy sauce and the good stuff is process and product. Good soy sauce begins with soybeans, wheat, salt and water. It is then fermented, aged and pasteurized. The other stuff begins with something called hydrolyzed soy protein. What happens after that is too difficult to understand let alone explain, but I think you get the picture.
Sweet, salty, sour and bitter are the four tastes we all learned about in school, but soy sauce is a major source of the more recently identified umami. Umami means savory which is why the addition of a good sauce soy sauce can add another level of complexity to your food.
Until living in Japan, I thought soy sauce was nothing more than the Asian solution for table salt. With that in mind, I had no problem pouring it over mounds of white rice which roughly equates to smothering an aged T-bone in ketchup. In Japan etiquette dictates that food should be dipped in soy sauce then lightly touched to rice before it is consumed.
I’m telling you all this for two reasons.
Reason #1:
I couldn’t find gyoza wrappers in my hardcore Latin neighborhood though I did find empanada wrappers. The promised gyoza recipe will be posted Thursday.
Reason#2:
More often than not, our collective soy sauce experience is limited to those tasteless packets, but picking up a bottle of Kikkoman, or another reputable brand, won’t break the bank and will bring a lot more umami goodness to your Asian meals.
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