How It's Made: Soy Sauce
Vocab level: C1
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Soy sauce is a staple of Asian cuisine, used as both a condiment and cooking ingredient.
Its roots are in the seasonings of ancient China.
Today you can buy artificial or chemically enhanced versions,
but authentic soy sauce is all natural and made the traditional way, by brewing soybeans and wheat.
At this small soy sauce company, they use the centuries-old slow fermentation method and just five ingredients.
Soybeans, water, wheat, sea salt and yeast.
They begin by pouring soybeans into a cooking device called a steam kettle.
After thoroughly rinsing the soybeans twice, they fill the kettle with water.
They close the lid and boil the beans for four hours.
Meanwhile, they pan-roast wheat in a skillet for 25 minutes.
Then they put the roasted wheat through a mill.
The mill's steel rollers crack each grain into several pieces.
This will enable the yeast to better penetrate the wheat during the fermentation process.
When the soybeans are ready, they take them out of the kettle and spread them out in large trays to cool.
When the beans cool to 33 degrees Celsius, it's time to add the wheat.
After mixing everything thoroughly, they sprinkle on yeast and mix again.
The ingredient proportions are key, which means it's a company secret.
To activate the yeast, they transfer the mix to shallow boxes and stack them for about 48 hours in a controlled incubation room.
This process generates heat, which rises,
so they have to gradually move boxes to lower racks, preventing overheating, which would kill the yeast.
For the next stage, they make a brine by mixing fine sea salt with spring water.
To give its soy sauce a distinctive taste,
this company reuses bourbon barrels from local distilleries to act as fermentation vessels.
Traces of bourbon in the wood permeate the mix as it ferments,
infusing the sauce with a subtle smoky and sweet flavour.
After dissolving the sea salt in the spring water, they add the soybean mix,
creating a moromi, the Japanese word for soybean mash.
They blend for a few minutes, then seal the barrel and leave it to ferment.
Once a day for the first six weeks, they open the barrel and mix the moromi to aerate the gases that build up.
This keeps the yeast active and helps develop the flavour.
Then after that, they open and mix just once a week.
After 12 months of fermentation, it's finally ready.
They open the barrel and mix one last time.
Then they empty the barrel onto a sheet of muslin, lining the tub of a stainless steel press.
They fold over the sheet to enclose the moromi.
Then they lay down planks of wood to form a solid, flat surface.
This press applies six tons of pressure, forcing the planks downward against the moromi.
This squeezes out all the liquid, which is the soy sauce.
It drains out through a hose at the base and then moves on to be filtered and heat pasteurized.
The pressed moromi gets a new life as high-protein animal feed.
While many soy sauces are mass-produced, this factory brews small batches at a time.
A batch yields about 600 bottles, each of which are filled manually.
They top each bottle with a plastic diffuser, which allows just a dash of sauce at a time.
Then they twist on a plastic cap and slip a shrinkable plastic band over it.
Using a heat gun, they seal the band tightly around the cap and bottle,
then the label on which they write the batch code and bottle number by hand.
A fitting finale for this signature soy sauce.
Very tasteful.
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