How would traditional taste to someone who has spent their life on mass produced kikoman?
Specialty markets sell imported Kikkoman products, such as “traditionally brewed” soy sauce which tastes stronger. Note that “stronger” doesn’t mean “better”: Asian consumers are used to using different styles of soy sauce as they see fit. U.S. consumers still largely view soy sauce as a single thing with no variation except maybe “low sodium”. Definitely worth exploring the different varieties.
For example, I find kikkoman to be absolutely awful for fried rice. It has an oddly sharp taste that just doesn't work. Chinese soy sauces don't have that sharpness but have a very wide and smooth savoriness that works well with fried rice. But if you try Chinese soy sauce with sashimi, it tastes flat and very wrong. That sharpness of a Japanese soy sauce works better, and a high quality Japanese soy sauce has a milder sharpness that emphasizes the fish flavors but not so weak that it makes the flavor weird like a Chinese soy sauce would.
https://www.amazon.com/Kikkoman-Maroyaka-Sauce-33-8-Ounce-Pa...
Haven't compared it side-by-side with the normal stuff, but anecdotally it tasted a little more mellow to my palette, and I will probably continue using it moving forward when my 1L bottle runs out.
Ketchup is like a staple unobjectionable thing to stock in the fridge for kids/guests/comfort. Stocking a weird one kind of defeats the purpose.
I'd rather try various steak / bbq / teriyaki / whatever sauces that set out to be categorically different.
I'd rather explore entirely other flavors/categories than spend 4x on some fancy knockoff to signal I'm low brow high end. Extremely diminishing returns, and mostly just tastes different.
I don't need a $4 replacement for a Coke or a $5 Mac-n-cheese or a $10 bottle of ketchup.
Honestly we should all be buying less of these processed foods, not going further upmarket with them.
Citi Field used to serve French’s. Which is odd because they were doing Mike’s mustard… money talks I suppose.
My son who was little was like “dad, there’s something wrong with my hot dog.” I tried it, and yes, something was terribly wrong. That stuff tastes like they put tomato flavor in strawberry jam.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...
“The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s”— and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—“all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.”
You'll like it better than the harsh flavor of Kikkoman