Making of soy sauce

Have you ever use soy sauce in your cooking? and, ever wonder where it comes from or how it is made?

I grew up as a child following my mother to a soy sauce shop, in my local Hokkien dialect it’s called “tau eu tiam”. There were two shops along the street I grew up within less than a hundred metres from my then family home. I remember that my mother would bring her own little empty bottle and asked the shop to fill it up. At the back of the shop, there were metal and clay urns about waist high filled with soy beans fermenting in the hot sun. The process is extremely laborious and time consuming. The urns are marked based on the quality of the sauce and the number of times the sauce has been filtered and changed.

This traditional shop and artisanal skill is being replaced by machinery and artificial lighting to speed the production process. Don’t you think it would be a great experience to be taken back in time to see and learn how the sauce is made?

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