Showing the world how real soy sauce is supposed to taste

You can find real balsamic vinegar at virtually any grocery store. Made in Italy in Modena or broader Emilia region, using Lambrusco or Trebbiano grapes, aged at least 12 years, etc. Fully, legitimately balsamic vinegar.

Because the difficulty and complexity of making balsamic vinegar really isn't that far removed from, say, bourbon. And we all know you can find real, legitimate bourbon at any shady liquor store. It's a profitable venture so a lot of it is made.

Often these conversations turn into gate keeping, where we redefine what is "real" or not to disqualify the proles.

This is just false, real balsamic is easy to find and I have several bottles in my cabinet. There's even specialty stores that have a huge selection. Sure, its expensive, but so is other aged and concentrated products.

I don't think the "holier than thou" attitude is really necessary, there's no point in telling people they are eating/enjoying the "wrong" foods or that your tastes are so much more sophisticated than the peons, which is what this post boils down to.

I enjoy "proper" tomatoes and tomato based dishes (especially caprese with good quality ingredients) but I would never eat a tomato like I'd eat an apple. I very much enjoy a really good quality olive oil with bread, but I would never call it a "feast," nor do I consider it a particularly healthy choice. If the nutritional value/fullness were the same, I'd still pick the kitkat over vegetables many days. I think the fake truffle oil is nasty, but I don't go around putting down people who enjoy it, which many do. I also don't drink low quality beer, but I'm not running around putting down people who do.

>The kit kat taste WAY better than the red plastic clown nose people told them are tomatoes.

I lived in downtown Boston and we had a roofdeck with full sunshine nearly all day. We grew tomatoes and some herbs in a planter and it was awesome. It made you realize why tomato sauce always have sugar added (to compensate for lack of ripeness and sweetness). Tomatoes became a staple and even my finicky 8 year old loved to eat them!

>It's not their fault they prefer the kit kat.

Imma stop you right there. The kit kat was what sent me in search of what proper foods should taste like. I grew up in the US and as a kid I travelled to Canada with my Dad around age 10. He bought me a kit kat bar at a gas station at some point and I remember it looking much different than the ones in the US. I tasted it and it was the best kit kat I ever had in my life up until that point. It ruined me. I couldn't eat a US one again and enjoy it.

It turns out in the US we are sold a kit kat made of lies and deceit under license by Hershey. (actually it's just they use a ton more sugar and less cacao solids)

The original kit kat was made by Rowntree which was later purchased by Nestle, that's who makes them outside the US. I found out duty free sold cases of UK kit kats on the US/CA border so I've been like a kit kat missionary giving them to friends/family over the years and converting them. Shout out to Japan for making crazy flavors too.

Anyways the kit kat was my awakening to fake food products in the US and since then the curiosity stuck to just about any other kind of food. Lately I have been spreading the good news about real cinnamon since it really does have a whole depth of complexity in flavor that cassia (what all US stores sell) doesn't have.

> this slider format is terrible. I didn't get to the end of the article because of it.

if u shrink your window thinner it goes vertical like a normal article.

I’ve been on a personal quest to taste, at least once, the real version of things. Just so that I could say I had and have a point of reference. Olive oil that was pressed in front of my eyes, honey that was extracted from a hive in front of my eyes, etc... I wish there was a service that I could buy samples of food that were guaranteed to be the real thing.

The same way you can never taste the taste of a real Camembert in the US...

The best vegetables I've ever eaten were from a street stall in Mumbai, beetroot is actually delicious (I've always disliked it). +1 on your comment about olive oil.

> A lot of food is like that.

I swear people in America have never tasted a real, juicy, succulent tomato. I know why we distribute our tomatoes the way we do, but we should stop, because they are shit. It's always these tasteless, bland red things I don't even bother to call a tomato. Every time I go to Europe, it's weird, but one of the things i absolutely crave is real tomatoes.

That (JFYI) is Parmigiano Reggiano.

Vinegar (balsamic or not) does need some "mycoderma aceti":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_vinegar

for many vinegar producers it is a "family treasure" often more than one century old.

It sounds totally possible. There are a lot of home distillers that age whiskey by putting charred oak pieces in a jar of fresh whiskey. The problem with this process for aging whiskey is that it skips the evaporation that happens through the semi-porous wood and I've heard that the process of the liquid expanding and contracting through the wood also aids in a mellowing of the flavors.

What you're asking for is actually very common with wine. A lot of cheap reds and chards are made with oak chips in the stainless vats, and it's pretty controversial because it results in a different flavor profile from using oak barrels.

Edit: From Wikipedia's article on oak aging [0]:

> Oak chips have the benefit of imparting intense oak flavoring in a matter of weeks while traditional oak barrels would need a year or more to convey similar intensity. Critics claim that the oak flavoring from chips tend to be one-dimensional and skewed towards the vanilla extract with the wines still lacking some of the physical benefits that barrel oak imparts.[16] The use of oak powder is also less common than chips, although they are a very practical alternative if oak character is to be introduced during fermentation. Oak planks or staves are sometimes used, either during fermentation or aging. Wines made from these barrel alternatives typically do not age as well as wines that are matured in barrels.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(wine)

>Why not get rid of the ridiculously complicated (but truly beautiful) barrels, and instead use pieces of kioke wood, maybe from actual kioke barrels, in stainless vats? In other words, brew the soy sauce in stainless vats, but seed the cultures using pieces of wood that harbor the microbes. Why does the wood need to take the form of a barrel?

I do a lot of beer homebrewing, including long term lambic-style sour beers in barrels, which actually shares a lot of similarities with shoyu brewing.

Surface ratio is the big thing here. It affects not only how much of the flavor comes from the wood itself, but also oxygen ingress, etc. With shoyu it's open air, so a bit different compared to beer or wine which is usually aged in a sealed barrel, but it does affect the total amount of oxygen in there, even with an open fermentation. Oxygen will get in through wood, it won't through steel. But in general with chips or rods/spirals, you are imparting the wood flavor very quickly in comparison to a barrel, especially an old one. Depending on the biological interactions taking place, the organisms might not be able to process all of that in the same way they would over a longer period of time - they might have different reactions when some compounds are present in higher numbers, than if it is smaller. With beer brewing, if you are using brettanomyces strains of yeast, they produce entirely different flavors if the brett is used as the primary fermenter when there's tons of sugars available, or secondary/co-pitched fermenters where saccharomyces takes care of most of the sugars.

I expect you get different flavors from new kioke barrels as well - many microorganisms can eat the sugars in wood, so you're likely to have a different bioflora profile in something fermenting in a new barrel vs. one where it's all already been digested. And there's other processes that'll bring in flavors from fresh wood vs. old. It's a lot harder to maintain something like chips or even rods or spirals over the multiple decades of use you can get out of barrels.

It's not that I don't think all of those variables are possible to account for, in the theoretical sense, but no one has so far. Cantillon, a brewery in Belgium that is quite famous for their lambic beers has a sign in their brewery that translates to "Time does not respect that which is done without it", and in my experience, it's been true so far.

(Interestingly enough, there's other parallels with Cantillon here - this story talks about the microflora living in the eaves, etc. When expanding their barrel aging program to a new facility, they went and sprayed the whole thing down with their beer to try and jumpstart the microbes being in the environment.)

Maybe it needs air on one side? (No knowledge here, just conjecture.)

Yeah.

There's two things here that can be conflated. For instance, here's the ingredient list of La Choy soy sauce:

Water, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Corn Syrup, Salt, Caramel Color, Lactic Acid, Potassium Sorbate (Preservative). Contains Soy.

This is pretty clearly a "fake" soy sauce, in that it's not brewed, and there are additives made to simulate the flavor and color from a long brew. But here's the ingredients of Kikkoman, which you can find in almost any grocery store in the US:

Water, Soybeans, Wheat, Salt

That's a real brewed product. There are differences in brewing technique between a product made at scale like Kikkoman and the shoyu this article is about. But it's still fundamentally the same product. Which is not to say people shouldn't seek out traditionally brewed shoyu. But if you're using La Choy or generic store brand soy sauce, you can get a lot of the improvement in flavor you're going to get out of a traditional shoyu from just buying Kikkoman. And if you want to experiment beyond that, try Kikkoman or San-J tamari varieties.

EDIT: It's sort of like the difference between barrel aged beer/wine/spirits and aged differently. It's certainly more expensive (all else being equal) and different. It's not necessarily better.

I'll chime in too but about balsamic vinegar since someone else mentioned it. I've purchased store bought massed produced balsamic vinegar, American produced balsamic vinegar made in Napa, and DOP regulated balsamic vinegar aged 24 years from an acetaia in Modena. The difference between the first two is enormous. Massed produced balsamic vinegar is quite runny and quite "shallow" in favor. But between the latter two, the difference is much, much more subtle. For some things I honestly prefer the Whole Food purchased, produced in Napa balsamic vinegar I picked up for about $10 because I can really be a little indulgent. The Modena balsamic vinegar is almost too precious to use because the bottle is TINY and costed almost $50 (price I paid in Italy; double that if in the US). I mainly use it for special occasions or to flatter dinner guests. Also, Costco's IGP regulated balsamic is pretty comparable but I've found that their quality actually differs quite a bit between brands despite being regulated. But it's like $14 for a big bottle.

Thanks for the reality check — you've just saved me $40.

For now, anyway... .

$42 on Amazon is a huge ripoff. I think it's about $20 a bottle at my local Asian grocery store. I like it, but I don't have "super taster" powers either so take that for what you will.

Yes, it's better for certain end uses. For me, Yamaroku is more like a flaky finishing salt than, say, a Kosher salt (which I only use during the cooking process). I tend to use Kikkoman in most of my marinades because I can't appreciate the flavor of the shoyu as much (and also because all my [Grandmother's] recipes have been optimized for that brand).

"the BEST" version of something is probably not that much different from the merely good versions. But, for example, real olive oil is fairly different from canola oil dyed green.

I've found for me it works somewhat in reverse. The good version of something is good but not amazing- but then after I get used to the good version and I eat some of the crummy version I used to eat, I find it disgusting.

Narrative is at the essence of what makes something premium, whether that narrative is true or not.

This is like the story around Yemeni coffee/Port of Mokha, Chinese companies buying defunct Japanese camera brands, etc. This happens with watch brands, clothing companies, motorcycles, etc.

That said, I'm a sucker for this bullshit and bought both of the 4-year aged sauces they sell. And yes, I bought Port of Mokha (which wasn't much different from other high-end coffee beans but at 2-3x the price) too

> Soy Source isn't from Japan. It originated from China.

Slide 6 of the article: Soy sauce is one of the world’s oldest condiments. It originated in China roughly 2,200 years ago and is believed to have been introduced to Japan by a Buddhist monk in the mid-13th Century. Unlike Chinese jiang, which is typically fermented in clay jars, Japanese shoyu has traditionally used wooden barrels, giving it a smoother, more aromatic taste. As a cheap and handy all-purpose seasoning, shoyu quickly became an indispensable staple in Japanese kitchens – and its role in shaping the country’s cuisine has been immense.

Funny how so often gatekeeping involves rewriting history to ignore anything older than modern nation states :)

Most breweries maintain a couple of different yeast cultures, each of which is a single strain of saccharomyces. Every organism in each sample is genetically identical, to the extent that's possible.

This is much more akin to sour breweries. They will have some samples, and they may even buy different fermenting organisms from yeast companies, but part of their appeal is the spontaneity and variety that comes from a mixed-culture fermentation. These kioke look like open-top foeders. Coolships are another tool used for wild and spontaneous fermentations.

Adding wood to steel vats might be possible, but you have to worry about the surface area to volume ratio.

The article says Kikkoman has tried to replicate his process but wasn't able to.

Yeah, because the real deal costs $130 per pound: https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/09/real-wasabi-is-one-of-t...

I think the Japanese term for horseradish literally translates as "western wasabi"

It's not hard at all. That market is high end restaurants. Especially when I was in fine dining, we'd have farmers, importers and foragers showing up at the back door all the time with various vegetables, bottles of oils and vinegars, truffles, vanilla beans, etc... The market for individuals trying to buy these things is very small, but for restaurants, just look up rankings in a guide and show up at the top restaurants.

> Why is it so difficult for these producers to find that market?

Is it? I think they are, what makes you say otherwise?