Soy Sauce for Beginners
Kirstin Chen
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Govern a family as you would cook a small fish—very gently.”
“One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.”
“They said someday you’ll find / all who love are blind / Oh, when your heart’s on fire / You must realize / Smoke gets in your eyes.”
“Who knew that specialty food producers from bastions of Americana as Gainesville, Florida, and Louisville, Kentucky, had begun to experiment with artisanal soy sauce? According to a prominent food magazine, the Kentucky producer even aged its sauce in old bourbon barrels for an added whiff of smoke and local color. Top chefs all over America were raving about the depth of flavor the smoky sauce brought to dry-aged filet mignon and buttery black cod. An avant-garde chef in Chicago had infused the soy sauce into butter. The resulting concoction was spread on bite-sized brioche, topped with tobiko caviar, and served as the amuse bouche to his seventeen-course tasting menu.”
“When he made my favorite bak kut teh, a fragrant, spicy soup with tender pork spare ribs and fat shitake mushrooms, he always had me sample the stock. He taught me to make a big slurping sound as I sipped to avoid burning my tongue. He taught me to discern the warmth of cinnamon, the tang of orange peel, and the mellow licorice of star anise. Most importantly, Ba taught me to appreciate the way a dash of Lin's light soy sauce brightened each of these flavors while pulling them together into a single, harmonious whole.”
“These are some of my favorite smells: toasting bagel, freshly cut figs, the bergamot in good Earl Grey tea, a jar of whole soybeans slowly turning beneath a tropical sun.”
“These are some of my favorite smells: toasting bagel, freshly cut figs, the bergamot in good Earl Grey tea, a jar of whole soybeans slowly turning beneath a tropical sun. You'd expect the latter to smell salty, meaty, flaccid- like what you'd smell if you unscrewed the red cap of the bottle on a table in your neighborhood Chinese restaurant and stuck your nose in as far as it would go. But real, fermenting soybeans smell nothing like sauce in a plastic bottle. Tangy and pungent, like rising bread or wet earth, these soybeans smell of history, of life, of tiny, patient movements, unseen by the naked eye.”
“The mixture, Ahkong's creation, was sweet and tangy and savory- a comforting, full-bodied flavor like burnt sugar, or brown butter that contrasted sharply with the dancing bubbles on my tongue.”
“The hawker center was a large, open-air hall that housed four dozen independently owned food stalls, each specializing in a single signature dish, from barbecued stingray coated in fiery, pungent shrimp paste to Hokkien mee, a mixture of yellow and rice noodles, fried with eggs and then braised in rich, savory prawn stock.”
“Real soy sauce is as complex as a fine wine- fruity, earthy, floral also can, lah." Uncle Robert pointed out the lively acidity of the light soy sauce in comparison to the rich, mellow sweetness of the dark one. Light soy, he explained, was used for seasoning and dipping; dark soy was used for cooking because its flavors developed under heat.”
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Book Keywords:
experimenting, soybeans, sweet, hawker, father, fermenting, singapore, seasoning, concoction, cooking, soy-sauce, light-and-dark, favorites, flavors, business-process-improvements, seafood, asian-food, smells
