During my recent trip back to Penang, I made a visit to my favorite soy sauce factory in Georgetown. Though soy sauce is largely produced and packed commercially now, in Penang, you can still find a few remaining soy sauce factories making their soy sauce the natural way, that is, by hand.
The traditional method—sadly a dying and fast disappearing trade—ferments soybeans contained in large urns under the sun and covered up with lids at night. The soybeans are left inside the urns to “break down” and brew to become soy sauce. An everyday commodity that we so take for granted, naturally made soy sauce takes months of hard work and dedication to produce, and the result is always pleasing with an unmistaken depth and soybean fragrance in the end product…
I managed to capture a few pictures above to give you a rough idea how authentic soy sauce is made. My friend Chubby Hubby does a better job in explaining the processes in his post here.
I wanted to stress that while Kikkoman has made an empire out of soy sauce and fill the supermarkets in the US with its products, soy sauce was invented by the Chinese some 2,500 years ago. The techniques spread to Japan and other parts of Asia much later.
In the US, my favorite brand of soy sauce is Kimlan (金兰) from Taiwan. What brand of soy sauce do you have in your pantry?
Updated:
Thanks for sharing your favorite brand(s) of soy sauce with me. It is such a great exercise as it helps me to discover new brands. Just bought a bottle of Pearl River Bridge premium soy sauce (头抽) and compared it side-by-side with Kimlan. Love the depth and flavor; it’s such a great soy sauce. I am going to try out Aloha Shoyu next. :)
Andrew Hall
Kimlan dark is my unquestioned favorite, but I haven’t tried many brands. I should experiment.
jen
Thanks RasaMalaysia for all the info i learnt frm yr website. I was seaching for info on fake soysauce when i stumbled on yr website.
I jus bgt kikkoman japanese grill teriyaki sauce that looks n tastes like light soy sauce. I jus used it in my cooking n got a tummyache after tat. Jus really worried if its fake product esp after readin comments on soy sauce tat are high in metal toxins. Wat makes it more unassuring is tat the label comes off easily almost immediately, being thin n flimsy, leaving a bottle looking unnamed n.forlorn!
Think i i wl jus throw it away. :-(… even tho it states its made in singapore!
Dan
Rasamalaysia,
Kudos to you for all your culinary posts ..I did learn a ton on SE asian cooking.
So now that you have tried Pearl river bridge premium soy sauce, is that better than kimlan ? …Have you tried any other besides these two …You claim that Kimlan tastes similar to what you would find back home in Malaysia and they are not dark like the chinese ones …if thats the case how about yamasa ( brewed in the US ) as I thought it had robust flavors …Anyways please let me know what you suggest ..Also as I am a vegetarian do you have any recommendations for oyster sauce ?
Rasa Malaysia
You can buy vegetarian oyster sauce – Lee Kum Kee brand