Asian Ingredients

Asian ingredients are the seasonings and staples of East and Southeast Asian kitchens. They include soy sauce brewed from soybeans, usually with wheat, fish sauce from fish fermented with salt, chile pastes such as gochujang, noodles and seaweed.

How to choose Asian Ingredients

  • Koikuchi or usukuchi. Koikuchi, the all-purpose dark soy sauce, accounts for about 80 percent of Japanese output. Usukuchi is paler but uses around 10 percent more salt, and cooks reach for it when a dish should keep its own color.
  • Tamari or shiro. Tamari is thick and dense with savory flavor, the classic dip for sashimi. Shiro, or white soy sauce, is pale amber, mild and sweet, for clear soups and egg custards.
  • Fish sauce. The Codex standard defines it as fish fermented with salt and sets at least 200 grams of salt per liter, so a dash goes a long way.

About Asian Ingredients

Many Asian ingredients, including soy sauce, fish sauce and gochujang, are made the same way: with salt, time and fermentation. For koikuchi, the everyday dark soy sauce, steamed soybeans and toasted wheat are mixed in roughly equal parts and grown with koji mold for two to three days.

The koji then goes into a tank of brine, forming a mash called moromi that is stirred for six to eight months while mold, yeast and lactic bacteria ferment it. The mash is pressed in cloth, and the raw sauce is heated to set its flavor and clear it.

Fermented seasonings like these carry a lot of glutamate, which the tongue reads as savory umami, so a splash deepens a broth or a stir-fry.

At a glance

Made from
Soybeans, usually wheat, salt and koji; fish and salt
Main types
Koikuchi, usukuchi, tamari, refermented, shiro
Unopened
Soy sauce 18 to 24 months
Once opened
Refrigerate soy sauce; finish within a month

Asian Ingredients questions

Does soy sauce need to be refrigerated after opening?

Unopened soy sauce resists spoiling, but Japan's soy sauce trade body recommends the refrigerator once a bottle is open. Air gets in and starts oxidation, which deepens the color while the flavor fades. Try to finish an open bottle within about a month, or pour a small amount into a separate cruet for daily use and keep the rest cold.

What do honjozo and kongo mean on Japanese soy sauce?

They describe how the sauce was made. Honjozo is the traditional fully brewed method behind most Japanese bottles, with six to eight months of fermentation in brine. Kongo jozo, the semi-brewed method, adds amino acid liquid and other ingredients for a stronger savory taste, and kongo mixes in amino acids and additives to cut production time. Look for honjozo if you want the classic brewed taste.

What is gochujang made from?

Gochujang is a Korean fermented red pepper paste. Grain starch is first broken down into sugars, either with malt powder or by the microbes of fermentation, then mixed with salt, fermented and aged. Red pepper powder goes in before or after that fermentation, and powdered meju, made from fermented soybeans, may also be added. The result is a thick red paste that tastes sweet, salty and hot at once.

Sources: Japan Soy Sauce Information Center; Codex Alimentarius standard for fish sauce; Umami Information Center.

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