Japanese and oriental ingredients: Soy sauce

Soy sauce

Soy saucehas a lot of similarity with balsamic vinegar. It has sweetness, saltiness, smooth texture but with slight thickness, deep and complex flavor.

It has a lot of variety in kind, taste, maturity and specific category by region base. 

Both gets reduce the freshness and the flavor in quite a short time. Adding them to food adds up extra depth for the entire flavor.  

In Tokyo, many of us use the regular soy saucefor everything. For sushi, for cocking food, for dipping and all. Kansai - the west Japan uses light soy source more frequently. For specific cooking we use more specific varieties e.g. Tosa region soy sauce, dark soy sauce, Tamari (dark) soy source etc.

Regular soy sauce

This isn't really a category, but the most popularly used level of taste and thickness after excluding all specific ones. 

The soy source in bottle looks totally black, but if you put on a dish it has dark red-brown color, but unlike the real dark soy source we categories, the source is much liquidly and smooth.

There are a lot of different grade even in the same regular soy sauce, just as the proper balsamic vinegar.  The taste of soy sauce really varies just as its price. Honestly, the more expensive soy sauce you buy, the better the taste.

Good regular soy sauce tastes flesh, smooth, lightly sweet and not so salty, more than anything, it's tasty.

Cheep or old regular soy sauce test salty, tick, gets slightly sour, you can feel some dust of dried soy sauce in the liquid.

<Example products>

Very good: Kikkoman Tokusen Maldaizu Shoyu (extra selective whole soy beans soy source) 

The price is double from the one below product but the taste is equally better. If you really want to taste sushi better, you need one at your home. 

Daily use: Kikkoman Shoyu (Kikkoman soy source)

You can find a large bottle at any Asian/Oriental shops. 

Tesco and ASDA also sales the small serving bottles.

There are proper imported from Japan version, produced by EU / US version and from China version. Taste wise - you may not find that significant difference.

Soy sauce is very delicate, it require to be stored in a cool dark place.

I needed to store it in refrigerator when I was in Tokyo, now I can keep it in dark cool place is more than enough in England. The bottle needs to be capped firmly well as it also changes its taste by air.

All soy sauce must be used when it is flesh because the soy sauce taste changes significantly by time. 

Full large bottles are ideally to be spent within a month or less. The serving style small bottles should be spent in a week or so.

Saying this, I know it's difficult for many people to spend that quick. You can make the taste last longer if you cover the top of bottle with clear wrap well (for the serving small bottles), store the bottles in your refrigerator when you don't use.

For me, I buy just a daily use one, reason because I cannot cook sushi or sashimi as frequently as I can spend the whole bottle of good soy source up before it changes the taste.