To Take a Risk, to Dream, to Have Faith: To Make Soy Sauce

Channeling family roots and taking advantage of a Brooklyn bathtub

Illustrations: Sumayya Ansari

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We ran this piece four years ago, on Heated, and I think about it often, so I felt like it was worth bringing back. A long time ago, I got to work with Wei — like, in an office! — and she is such a joy to be with, and I think that joy and playfulness come out in her writing. I hope you love reading this.

Team Bittman is off next week — many of us will be together (Holly is coming to visit!), and we’ll be cooking and putting together fun videos and content that we think you’ll really like. Have a great last week of August! — Kate

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I’d never even wondered what soy sauce was, really, until last summer, when I listened to Shunan Wang, the owner of Tea Drunk, wax rhapsodic about the complexities of the stuff, swooning over its citric notes as if it were a fine wine or whiskey.

At her beautiful shop in New York City, over tiny glasses of fresh Guapian, a green tea from Anhui Province, she regaled me with stories of the strange fermented delights she’d stumbled across during her adventures through China in search of tea: blocks of tofu inoculated with a mold that eventually left them swaddled in a mat of dense white hair. Fermented chili peppers fried into pancakes that you could only stand to eat a corner at a time, washed down with red hot swigs of baijiu, an incredibly high-proof Chinese liquor.

But what she really missed, she said, was soy sauce. When she was growing up in China, it was commonly brewed in small batches in her town. She said you could smell it just walking by: salty, a little alcoholic, pungent, and yeasty.

In fact, according to a 2014 study, soy sauce is the third most consumed condiment in the United States — as American as ketchup and mayonnaise.

“No no no,” Shunan said. “Real soy sauce is fermented. All of those are made in a chemical process. They’re just like…salt.”

I later learned that much of the soy sauce found in supermarkets or at lunchtime sushi joints is made via a speedy three-day process called acid hydrolysis. After soybeans are pressed for oil, the remaining byproduct is boiled for half a day in hydrochloric acid — used mostly in industrial processes, say, for removing rust from iron or steel — until the protein breaks down into amino acids. The liquid is strained and clarified using more chemicals, then flavored with everything from citric acid to molasses, resulting in the inky brown substance we generally think of as soy sauce.

On the other hand, traditional soy sauce, invented more than 5,000 years ago in China, uses just five ingredients: soybeans, wheat, mold, water, and salt. Well, six, if you count time: It takes anywhere from a few months to five or more years for the proteins in soy to naturally collapse into flavorful amino acids, all the while collecting various strains of yeast and bacteria, and aging several seasons.

“I don’t think it would be so hard to try to make it on your own…” Shunan said, trailing off.

I’ve written regularly about Chinese-American culture and cuisine for years, investigating everything from baijiu to salted duck eggs; I’m even writing a cookbook about Chinese-American food with my friend, the chef Jonathan Wu. I don’t think of myself an authority on the cuisine, but I’m certainly conversational when it comes to the expansive landscape comprising both General Tso’s chicken and braised beef tendon.

You can imagine, then, how the conversation with Shunan dogged me like a playground taunt. You don’t know what real soy sauce tastes like. Given how essential the condiment is to Chinese cuisine across its diverse permutations, I felt exposed. Could I really know anything about Chinese food if I didn’t know the first thing about soy sauce?

Yet it wasn’t until I was elbow-deep in literature about soy and fermentation that it occurred to me there was another reason why the question felt so all-consuming. You see, ever since I was a child, my father, who immigrated to the United States during the Cultural Revolution, told me stories of my family’s life in Shanghai — we’d made a fortune off of soy sauce. We owned factories, then a wide network of shops, and, eventually, an entire town, just outside of Shanghai. But during the Cultural Revolution, everything was confiscated, everything lost.

It is a part of my family history that feels less elusive than the network of aunties and uncles I speak to infrequently on the phone, who live on the other side of the world, whose names, much less faces, are constantly slipping my mind. Looking at a bottle of soy sauce is just more tangible than a family history wrought with trauma and forgetting.

We were like the Kennedys, Dad once mused while sitting back in a chair and recalling the family business. If it weren’t for the Cultural Revolution, he once said to me, you’d be like a princess. It always made me swell a little bit with pride to remember this, especially in my first years in New York when I felt deeply insecure, surrounded by colleagues with Ivy League educations, whose surnames could be traced back to famous intellectuals and cultural institutions. If they only knew, a part of me would think when I felt intimidated by their intellectual pretension, by their good diction. I clung to the stories of my family’s past, to their aristocratic trappings, hoping they might mean something about me.

And though I sensed there was something specious about my reliance on this belief, I had never really interrogated it until I found myself chasing that dream directly, saving a folder of tabs, hoarding screenshots culled from books, calling up old sources to chat about fermentation chambers and proper sanitization. It was simple: If I could just produce soy sauce, I could prove my direct link back to these upper-crust ancestors. I could prove to myself that I was really one of them.

Eventually, I cobbled together a recipe and enough equipment to produce 5 gallons of soy sauce. Then one evening last September, sitting at my kitchen table in my apartment in Brooklyn, I calculated a painstaking schedule that listed the exact weight, volume, temperature, humidity, and timing of each step of the process. I rose the next morning with the sun, disinfected my tiny kitchen, snapped on rubber gloves, and got to work.