Forget salt and pepper. As the product of two generations of Chinese restaurant chefs — not to mention a literal thousand years of Hokkien Han Chinese ancestry — soy sauce was the fundamental seasoning basis of nearly everything I ate after I had graduated from Gerber baby products. At the restaurant, we had various types, but they were such commonplace staples that I gave them little thought. That is, until I moved away and had to figure out how to make Chinese food on my own.
Armed only with your everyday Kikkoman “regular” soy sauce, whose logo I recognized from the buckets at my parents’ restaurant and the iconic double-spouted bottle, I tried my hand at stir-fry, fried rice and wonton meat. Everything tasted weak, watered down and weird. I called my dad, who told me all I needed was soy sauce. But what was lost in translation is that there are a bajillion types of soy sauce, and each of them does different things and has different flavor nuances.
When I finally found an Asian supermarket, you could have knocked me over with a soybean pod. With an entire row dedicated to different types of soy sauce, I was overwhelmed by the selection and the realization that even though I’d been consuming various forms of it my whole life, I actually knew next to nothing about soy sauce.
So for the sake of those who didn’t grow up with it, I ask on everyone’s behalf: What the soy? And who uses what and why?
Why So Many Types Of Soy Sauce?
The origin of soy sauce as we know it starts with the discovery of Chinese jiang, a fermented soy paste that brings out intense umami. Its use spread to Korea and Japan, which made it their own in the late 1600s by thinning it into a liquid and calling it shoyu — the basis of the word soy. In its new form, it began the journey that continues today.
“Historically, there was hyper-regionality; communities and individuals would produce their own supply of soy sauces,” explained Brian Yong, culinary director of the viral…
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