Still a necessity
We smell it before we see it. The smell is warm and loamy and alive, utterly at odds with the surroundings, an industrial park in a region of Singapore so remote we may as well be in Malaysia. Singaporeans have a word for this — ulu, we say. A place that is remote, rural, hard to get to, and consequently beneath the notice of our global citizens. Every building in sight is a box of reinforced concrete or sheet metal siding, or a daring combination of the two. We drive past Chinese dealers in halal meat, Indian millers catering to Malay bakeries, biscuit factories of indeterminate ownership. None of them smell.
Our noses guide us to a courtyard of terracotta urns framed by concrete painted cream. A collection of urns this large has a faintly mortuary air. I find myself thinking of Egyptian burials and mummified cats, and that I would, correctly dismembered, fit easily in one of these. The urns are of approximately equal size, with a rough, deep brown glaze. Their round glass lids are propped up with anything at hand — small rocks, bottle caps, shards of urn. This is the Nanyang Sauce brewery, one of a handful of artisanal soy sauce producers left in Singapore.
Ken Koh (许培荣), the owner, is a baby-faced 35. The showroom contains a dozen clippings of him in the local news. They tell a story whose arc every Singaporean knows by heart, the plot worn to myth by ceaseless repetition. Ken’s grandparents started the brewery, his parents took over, he was raised on the premises. He was supposed to be the generation that got out. The work was too hard. Making soy sauce, like nearly every other trade, is considered a humble occupation, one best left to die out in a society of college graduates. The story doesn’t say how soy sauce gets made in this society.
Everyone we see at the factory is at least twenty years older than Ken. He is the only one not actually making soy sauce. There are no machines in sight except for a forklift and a pump. A hydraulic press is tucked away somewhere. His 93 year old grandmother squats on the floor, applying labels to bottles by hand. She seems to be having a good time.
The building’s second storey has two rooms. In the larger room sits a giant kettle for cooking soy beans and a half ton of soy beans in sacks. They’re non-GMO, from Canada, the best they can get, facts that become mantra in Ken’s mouth. He says nothing about the wheat they use, though in some breweries wheat is a third of the raw material. Sometimes the wheat is added as flour, sometimes as cracked and toasted grains. Depending on who you believe it is either added chiefly for moisture control or a key component of the flavor.
The smaller room is directly off the larger. Next to the door there is also a hose, and a stack of bamboo trays. This is where the cooked beans are fermented for the first time, with a mould the Japanese call koji and Ken’s parents call tau poh — bean seeds — in Hokkien. The door stands open almost all the time. Climate control consists of the windows and door, which are opened and closed; and the hose, with which they sluice the floor when the room gets too dry or too hot. The Noma Guide to Fermentation suggests you use a fermentation chamber set to 25C for the first 24 hours and 29C for the next 24. Ken’s parents shepherd the fermentation for several days. The tau poh is their own, descended from the first batch Ken’s grandfather used. They cultivate it in a separate room, in case the bamboo trays are insufficient inoculant.
When the beans and wheat are covered in a fine white fuzz like Yoda’s head, they are brought downstairs, still on the trays, and mixed with salt water in the urns — ang in Hokkien. Some of the ang are better than the others. The ones that are not glazed on the inside are better than those that are, but of those some, for unknown reasons, are best of all. His parents know which ones. The ones with dragons came from a neighboring producer, now extinct. His parents bought the urns when they closed. The dragon urns are glazed on the inside. Some of the ang are private, their entire production sold to single families, relationships that extend back to his grandparents’ day. Again, his parents know which ones. They are filled only when emptied, and emptied only on the clients’ request. I did not ask how long it takes a single family to use an ang of soy sauce.
The jiang jio sits in the ang for at least 9 months. The ang sit in the sun. The beans and water become a wet mush, Western writers commonly describe the texture as “applesauce”. A mat of soy beans forms on top. Ken was cagey about how much the contents are disturbed. Soy sauce from the tropics used to be held in high esteem in Greater China. They believed the hotter climate resulted in a more intensely flavored brew. No one reliable suggests that this process takes place at anything but ambient temperature.
The mat of soy beans in an ang. Ken was vague on the use of the homemade knives scattered all round the courtyard. It’s common for brewers to punch the mat down with their bare hands.
Getting the sauce out of the jiang jio might be the hardest part. Sandor Katz, in his benchmark The Art of Fermentation, describes his method for the home:
Place moromi [the mash] in a mesh, canvas, or other coarsely woven pressing sack, or a few layers of cheesecloth. Twist it and press to force out liquid. Use your body weight and all your might; press against a sturdy board, arranged so that liquid drains into a bowl. Get someone else to help you to double the force pressing liquid from the moromi. After you press as much as you think you can, open the sack, stir the contents, twist the bag as tight as you can, and press again. Use your engineering acumen to devise a makeshift press to express as much shoyu liquid as possible from the moromi.
Now do this on an industrial scale.
The tool of choice is an electric or hydraulic press. Each ang gets topped up with water before pressing, to replace what’s stolen by the sun. Japanese producers empty the slurry into huge sheets of canvas and fold them into neat packages and stack them in a hydraulic press. It looks like they’re squeezing the ink from a book. Others use electric presses that resemble squat steel mortars. These are less dramatic, and do not require signatures of canvas stacked twice head high.
Salt collected from the ang after the sauce is decanted. A visitor from overseas tasted it and contracted to buy their entire production.
The first pressing is called the 头抽 (tao chiu) and is widely understood to be the best sauce you can get. Modernizers call it “Virgin Brew”, after olive oil. A more direct translation would be the chief, or head, draught. There is no equivalent Japanese term, because the Japanese do not commonly reuse the pomace from the press. At Nanyang, the beans are steeped at least 3 or 4 times. The pomace from the first press is mixed with fresh brine, then returned to the ang for a second, shorter, steep. Subsequent steeps, shorter still, take place in large tanks built into the walls of the courtyard. For these the pomace from several ang is combined. The first two pressings are bottled in glass and sold under the Nanyang brand, for the price of decent wine. Subsequent brews go in plastic bottles and are sold in wet markets and provision shops as Golden Swan, $3 a litre.
The light soy 头抽 resembles a delicate filter coffee. There is nothing light about the smell. It smells like that mat of beans in a way that wine does not smell like grapes, the scent is blackened and parched and cleansed by the sun. Taste it and you get a mouthful of esters. Fruit from all latitudes, in all stages of ripeness and overripeness. In Japan this might be a flavor of bubblegum. The sauce is 4% sugar and 15% salt. There are undoubtedly other compounds that would show up in a refractometer, but the refractometer would not capture its oily heft on the tongue.
The dark 头抽 is more like black ink, beady and opaque. Wheat flour is added along with a larger dose of sugar. Some places make their dark soy by aging light soy further after pressing. All Ken would reveal is that theirs is made separately from the light, with a different proportion of solids to brine. It is mushroomy and direct and smells fruitier than it tastes. Mostly it is tight — complex but inexpressive, meant to bloom in a long-cooked braise.
More or less their entire production.
Once you exclude the factories that use acid hydrolysis, artisanal and industrial brewers of soy sauce differ mostly in scale. The two most common brands in Singapore are brewed in factories across the Straits of Johor. Where Nanyang has a courtyard of ang, they each have a football field. They ferment for shorter periods, sometimes at higher temperatures, but the processes involved are more similar than those of, for instance, Chanel’s atelier and a factory for the Gap, even if the gulf in quality is similar.
The remaining producers in Singapore are all family firms. The youngest generation, Ken’s generation, is involved in most of them. In each case, the scions had other jobs before returning to the fold. It’s conventional to cite family loyalty as the reason for doing so, and it is equally conventional to protest that this wasn’t supposed to happen. The news clippings in Ken’s showroom are silent salvos in an intergenerational conversation about the worth of the endeavor. The new owners mostly do the marketing, taking something their families have always made and figuring out how to sell it for more money. This is about context as much as cost of living, about ideas that didn’t exist when Ken’s grandfather brewed his first batch. The reasons you can’t make a living selling soy sauce for $2 a litre anymore are the reasons you can sell 头抽 for $36 a litre now. Soy sauce remains a near necessity. Ken’s parents still check each ang every day in the sun.
Transliterating Hokkien is an imprecise exercise at best, and it is even more so when, like me, you are neither a linguist nor a native speaker of the dialect. There are two widely used systems, but I don’t have the training to use them, so the transliterations here are, well, terrible and my own.
This week’s newsletter was inspired by this essay on Medium. An American-born Chinese author whose family had run a soy sauce brewery in Shanghai documents her attempt to brew some at home. I had a pretty visceral reaction to her use of Japanese terminology since she was ostensibly exploring her roots, and this grew from there.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
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best,
tw
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