A non-comprehensive overview of soy sauce
There’s a certain sort of face that people make that conveys, approximately, are you utterly kidding me, crossed with of course you do, crossed with this makes perfect sense now that I have thought about it for a little bit. When I see that face, I make a mental note to write some text about it. It’s a good text face. The goal with text is to create that face as often as possible.
I had a dear friend over the other night, and I decided, at the last minute, to make him some wat tan hor. It’s an easy pantry recipe, really just requiring some greens if you have ‘em, enough veg of whatever kind to blend with the eggs and shrimps and stock that you already definitely have on hand.
I did this almost rote, which requires both light soy sauce & dark soy sauce. I pulled everything out for my mise, and my friend noticed the bottles and asked “is that two kinds of soy sauce?”
“Yes.” “Why do you have two different kinds of soy sauce?” “I have five different kinds of soy sauce.”
Face.
We will now discuss my five kinds of soy sauce. This is not an exhaustive list of soy sauce; it is only what I have on hand.
Wat tan hor, and in fact most Chinese dishes, use a combination of light soy sauce and dark soy sauce. The dark soy sauce exists mostly to add a richer color to the dish. It is darker and thicker, and it is a non-optional component of red braises, Sichuan stir-fries, and white rice. The Woks of Life has a nice write-up.
Light soy sauce is what you think of when you think of “soy sauce.” It’s what I cook with almost every week. It’s what I use as my base when creating Japanese, Chinese, or Korean sauces. There is a half-gallon blongus of light soy sauce in my fridge at all times.
I also keep tamari around, which is a gluten-free kind of soy sauce made without wheat. I use it exclusively when a gluten-free human is coming over. I think I have been on the same bottle for five years, which is horrifying. More on the Spruce.
Next is spent grain shoyu from Co-Op Sauce, my favorite hot sauce purveyor in Chicago, which ferments the spent grains from a local brewery. It tastes lightly funky; I use it mostly for salad dressings, but I suspect it’d work marvelously in any sauces that need a deeper acidic & umami balance. It’s kind of a long tail thing. I don’t really need it.
And finally, I have traditional Japanese barrel-aged soy sauce, an astonishing achievement and an affordable luxury that all of you should own. It flew under the radar in the West for decades – until Samin Nosrat featured it prominently in the “salt” episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat on Netflix. She shouted out the soy sauce brewery that I had depended on for 15 years, cleaning out their supply to date and effectively ruining my chance at ever sourcing it again. As of press time, a single bottle goes for $155 on Amazon. This one is a good substitute. Heaven help me if this text blows up. I use it for dipping onigiri & sushi, adding to rice straight, dressing soba bowls, and generally impressing my friends.
I’m not going to say you should own 5 kinds of soy sauce, but I will say that if you’ve been making Sichuan food for 19 years, it is not unreasonable to own 5 kinds of soy sauce. In fact, at the rate I’m going, it’s not that much soy sauce. Writing this has shown me the simplicity of my soy sauce options. You’re making that face again.