[Sca-cooks] Soya

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Rosine:

>    I can attest to that. We bought a HUGE canister of Kikkoman's while we
>were in Japan 20-mumble years ago and whenever it gets down to 3/4 full, we
>refill it with some from the import shop and let it sit for 6 months. It's
>so dark and so - powerful - that we have to buy a "regular" American-normal
>brand to serve to our guests, most of the time, as they use it without
>tasting it and then make the awfulest faces and complain that it's gone bad!

Speaking of esoteric processes used to make soy sauce more palatable
(were we? I've come down with the mother of all colds and am somewhat
chemically unbalanced this AM; I just typed "powerful" instead of
"palatable", for example), I find that my hands-down favorite table
soy for Chinese foods is the stuff they use in many of our local dim
sum restaurants.

This turns out to be the soy used for cooking soy-sauce chicken and
other red-cooked dishes, generally with dried tangerine peel, star
anise and/or five spice powder, and some gelatin richness from the
meats cooked therein, all cooked back down to more or less its
original consistency, skimmed of all fat, and filtered.

It's less salty than most regular soy (some of the salt having gone
into the meat), and has a wonderfully rich, complex flavor. I assume
it doesn't keep as well or as long as the regular stuff.

This is, of course, not suitable for strict vegetarians, but there
are actually probably more of those in the West than there are in
Asia, because while there are probably many more vegetarians in Asia,
many of them see the practice with a different philosophy, and would
not be defined as strictly vegetarian in the West. Your average
dim-sum house is not exactly a beacon of vegetarianism, for whatever
reason.

Adamantius