I was swapping recipe tips on a comments thread recently, and the recipe in question involved soy sauce. I am a big fan of this particular seasoning, and I launched into a lengthy discussion of it. When I had finished regurgitating, I got to thinking – hey! This is good stuff! Why am I wasting this on a comments thread? It could be a discrete blog post! So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado I present to you Everything You Needed To Know About Soy Sauce (But Were Afraid To Ask):
There are two – and only two – important points that need to be considered if you are to get the most out of your soy sauce investment. The first is in the buying. Look at the ingredients list of the soy sauce you are interested in. It should consist of soy beans, water, wheat flour and salt. That is it. If it has some kind of hydrolyzed protein shit in it or any other weirdness, recall that that is the mark of an inferior sauce. Desist.
The second is in the storing. Soy sauce goes stale. Remember this when considering storage options. Once opened, most leave their soy sauce on the shelf at room temperature. This is not optimal. Storing it in the fridge will keep it fresher (much) longer. Unfortunately, the majority of non-Asians require a couple of years to work their way through a bottle of soy sauce. No wonder; it will start to taste pretty ordinary if opened and subjected to a few months at room temperature. When soy sauce goes stale, it tastes like salty brown water. It loses complexity. Who would want to cook with that? You will see what I mean if you compare the taste of fresh sauce to that of the stuff sitting in your cupboard for the past half-decade. Look, just keep your soy sauce in the fridge and stop quibbling. And if you have not used the bottle after – say – no more than a year, replace it.
Of course, soy sauce is not soy sauce. There are many breeds of this beast, from the light soy poured over cheong fun (the so-called Cantonese cannelloni) at a dim sum banquet, to kecap manis, the viscous, sweet soy sauce common in Indonesian cuisine. The recipe mentioned at the start of this post benefits from a light soy sauce.
And what is this recipe? Perhaps you have had Hainanese chicken – this dish is very similar and very easy to prepare. You need a whole chicken, some roughly chopped shallots (spring onions), a handful of roughly chopped ginger and eight to ten star anise cloves. Put the shallots, star anise cloves and ginger into a large pot and place the chicken on top of it. Fill the pot with cold water – enough so that the chicken is comfortably submerged. Heat until boiling, then allow to boil for a further thirty minutes. Turn off heat and allow to cool for several hours; overnight is ideal. Remove chicken and place on a platter – it should fall apart with little effort and be very tender. Sprinkle flesh with light soy sauce immediately before eating – “immediately” as in when the chicken is on your plate and you are about to stuff it in your mouth.
Some asides – a whole chicken works best with this dish, but you can use whatever chicken you have, as long as it is on the bone. DO NOT use breast fillets – they will become unacceptably tough. Breast meat is over-rated, anyway. It may well be the leanest part of the bird, but it is also the chewiest and least succulent. Why would you pay more for it? It is crap. Thigh meat is by far superior.
Strain the ginger, star anise and shallots out of the remaining water, skim any fat off the surface and add some salt – you now have a pot full of proper, home-made, not-bought-from-the-supermarket, gourmet-approved chicken stock!
This recipe may not sound so tasty – cold, boiled chicken – but trust me, it works. It is ideal picnic food and goes brilliantly with a salad. Perhaps this salad. Enjoy.
A year? Christ, I get through a bottle of Kikkoman a week!
Soy sauce sprinkled over lightly buttered toast: food of the gods.
For those of you with a taste for “fusion-cuisine” I suggest that a mixture of soy-sauce and balsamic vinegar is an excellent and very versatile condiment especially with seared tuna. I got the idea from watching an Aussie chef on the telly. He ran a bistro-type thing in Sydney. If anyone could furnish me with his name I’d be bloody grateful because I’d like to Google some of his recipes.
James,
Shallots are not spring onions.
There’s a tiny basement “restaurant” in Boston, MA’s Chinatown called Wai-Wai that does this kind of chicken – although it’s served hot, on an Everest of rice. First you get a bowl of the broth; then comes the plate. The food looks like nothing, boring and bland. Looks are deceiving. I have quite literally walked a mile in a snowstorm to get some. (They also serve a ginger “ice cream” that is exactly the same color as the chicken and rice, and is just as fabulous.)
Nick –
Could the Aussie chef you’re thinking of be Bill Granger?
There may be an “or” missing directly after the opening bracket and before “spring onions”.
Shallots are not spring onions.
They are in Australian English.
Dr Syn,
That’s the fella, thanks!
Top bloke and enormously recommended.
Michael,
Spring onions are spring onions (or scallions). Aussies might have recently beat us at a pointless activity (it isn’t sport if you can do it in a chunky-knit tank-top) but they lag well beyond the Northern Hemisphere in the recognition of common-place veggies. And your water goes down the plug-hole the wrong way round… And that’s moral turpitude that is, not the Coriolis effect.
Nick, moral turdipude?
I’ve tried that soy/balsamic combination. It tastes great. It gives me a headache. Isn’t that essentially the same kind of headache that is a hangover? Maybe I use too much.
Jame’s bottle/year quantity surprised me too. I keep several bottles of Kikkomans in the fridge and refill them out of a gallon can.
They make a lot of soy sauce in the next county over from mine.
”Soy sauce sprinkled over lightly buttered toast: food of the gods.”
Ah, yes, me too. Sprinkle with white sesame seeds for a bacon-type taste.
The Breat Meat/Thigh Meat thing has always interested me. In the US, it’s a big deal.
I went to a “Kenny Rogers roaster” restaurant the first time I was in the US and ordered a roast chicken meal. The (black) girl serving asked me “white meat or dark?” and I got a strange look when I replied “Uh”?
Then she explained that white meat is the breast and dark meat is the thigh and drumsticks.
“Oh” I said. “Dark meat then.” Then she gave me another strange look.
It wasn’t until I told this story to a black guy that I worked with that it was explained to me that, in America, white people eat the white meat of the chicken and black people eat dark meat. And that’s just the way it is.
“It wasn’t until I told this story to a black guy that I worked with that it was explained to me that, in America, white people eat the white meat of the chicken and black people eat dark meat. And that’s just the way it is.”
I’m white and have always preferred dark meat. But then I’m from rural non-touristy florida and this kind of thing varies by region.
Where I last lived (N Central Florida) commercial barbacue was usually prepared differently by white and black people.
White people smoked the meat and added sauce afterward while black people smoked the meat and sauce together.
Both white and black people _ate_ both kinds though.
Also IME white people mostly prefer sweet cornbread and black people mostly prefer salty cornbread so there are differences in these things.
On soy sauce. A favorite bizarre snack of mine follows. Don’t gag, but … I take nice fresh cottage cheese, add a few teaspoons of soysauce (kikkoman’s light is best) and some sesame oil. Add salt, and pepper to taste stir very slightly and enjoy!
I have a friend whose background is from Trinidad, but that means she has a very complicated ethnic heritage (a mixture of Scottish, Syrian, African, Indian, and Chinese). She has actually complained to me about the way in which the English believe that the breast of the chicken is the best bit, and the way in which it is carefully sliced out and rationed, and the rest of the bird then just placed on the table for so that those strange people who like that kind of thing can help themselves. Her preference for the legs and wings and stuff is a Carribean thing, but she says the white English people look at her oddly when she expresses it. I have to confess though that personally I confirm the stereotype of white people. I prefer the breast. I have no idea what this preference means, though.
I am white(ish), and the only way I can tolerate chicken breast is when it is pounded, covered in beaten egg and bread crumbs/corn meal and fried. In Israel we call it “schnitzel”.
For some reason, when you buy the pre-formed fillets of ground chicken parts (don’t ask which parts) they’re always “breast meat.”
On the other hand, usually, when you buy chicken on the bone in a restaurant, more often than not you get leg quarters.
(Off the bone is either breast or McNugget(tm), which I suspect is a polite way of saying the poultry version of mountain oysters.)
michael farris: your taste is irreversibly ruined by Polish habit of various ‘syr’ fillers.
I remember being in Pshemysl (sp?) and getting as part of a breakfast fare a plate of cottage cheese with red paprika and red bell peppers.
Alisa, what about “pulochka”?
You mean drumstick? It’s fine, but the thigh is by far the best part, IMO.
Actually I began eating my cottage cheese/soy sauce/sesame oil snack in the US so I can’t blame that perversion on Poland.
BiaŠ‚y ser and paprika (fresh or pickled?) sounds like part of a great breakfast though I’ve never been in Przemysl.
Alisa: both are better, in my view, than the bland chicken breast. Especially with the right sauce.
michael: raw bell pepper and freshly (?) grinded paprika. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood that day for unusual combos; it felt totally wrong somehow.
Being somewhat lactose intolerant, I don’t go for the cottage cheese version, but it works just fine with fresh tofu.
And the white meat (chicken) is what I eat if I’m almost too late to the meal to get anything at all. Raised by my grandmother, who was once a short-order cook, from Texas/Oklahoma, we also figure sweet cornbread to be either cake, or a serious mistake by the baker.