From Sushi to Crudo, House-Made Soy Sauce Is Having a Moment

Around the world, chefs are harnessing the power of soy sauce to deliver the savory fifth taste, umami. When it comes to soy sauce, there are plenty of excellent options available commercially, but chefs everywhere have decided that making their own soy sauce from scratch is worth the trouble. For some, that means creating a custom blend or infusion for their restaurants. For others, it involves a time- and labor-intensive process of koji-led fermentation that turns soybeans and other ingredients into liquid gold. And as these chefs show, the results can become a restaurant signature.

Soy sauce blended in-house

At the brand-new Manhattan omakase spot Sushi Akira, chef Nikki Zheng mixes custom soy sauces for specific uses. “How the soy sauce is blended depends on the type of fish, determining whether a lighter or richer flavor is needed,” she says. Similarly, New York’s Omakase Room by Shin gently reduces a mix of sake, sweet sake, and soy sauce as finishing touch, marinade, and condiment. “Many of my guests have credited what they taste and feel to the freshness of the fish, but my secret touch is the soy sauce blend,” says chef Shin Yamaoka.

George Chen, chef and owner of San Francisco’s China Live, blends a salt-forward Japanese soy sauce, a sweeter Chinese version, and a small amount of Indonesian kecap manis with added palm sugar and spices for his House Soy Sauce, which works well as a condiment for dishes like sheng jian bao.

While many sushi chefs tweak their soy sauces, few advertise it. For Daisuke Nakazawa, chef and owner of New York- and Washington, D.C.-based Sushi Nakazawa, that’s because this individuality is a matter of course. “It’s part of the foundation of the entire menu, much like preferring a type of rice or a progression of nigiri.” Nakazawa boils and cuts soy sauce from Honzen, a 400-year-old Japanese brewery, with sake and mirin, a style he calls “nikiri,” which directly translates as “to boil” or “to cook.” “Great sushi chefs will taste another chef’s nikiri and try to figure out how it was made.”

Related: Upgrade Everything You Cook With Japanese Shoyu

Soy sauce infused in-house

Infused soy sauce is also a common touch for chefs. Boston Chinese-inspired restaurant Mr. H flavors its house “strange sauce” with star anise, cinnamon, fennel seeds, Chinese black cardamom, and Sichuan peppercorn. At Moon & Turtle in Hilo, Hawai’i, chef Mark Pomaski infuses soy sauce with smoked kiawe, a type of mesquite tree classified as invasive on the island, for his smoky sashimi.

Porgy’s Seafood Market in New Orleans also uses a smoked ingredient to infuse its white soy sauce. Owner Caitlin Carney says she and the team want to do justice to all of their seafood “by using the entirety of the fish in one way or another,” so when they break down huge fish like tuna, swordfish, and almaco jack, they make “Spinal Soy,” a play on shiro dashi with white soy sauce in which the typical bonito is replaced by the smoked spines of huge fish like tuna, swordfish, and almaco jack.

The shop’s Lady Monger's Crudo features the best cut of fish from the daily case — along with seasonal fruit and herbs like Louisiana strawberries, spring onion, and dill — making it a perfect showcase for the Spinal Soy.

Related: Easy Soy Sauce Ramen

Soy sauce made from scratch

Fermenting soy sauce from the ground up, with koji as the catalyst, requires weeks or months of care. NOIO, the Japanese restaurant at Four Seasons Resort Hualalai in Hawai’i, worked around this by developing private-label light and dark soy sauces with Japanese brewery Kajita Shoten.

James Wayman, chef and owner of restaurants including Nana’s in Westerly, Rhode Island, and Mystic, Connecticut, co-founded Moromi, a producer of traditional soy sauce and miso. So now his restaurants use not just boutique soy sauces made with local ingredients like sugar kelp,  but they also use byproducts such as soy sauce lees — the remaining sediment from soy sauce production — which get pressed, dehydrated, and mixed with Parmesan as a pizza topping.

It’s not unheard of for restaurants to do it all themselves, either. At 2012 F&W Best New Chef Corey Lee’s restaurant Benu in San Francisco, soy sauce production doubles as decor, with Korean fermentation vessels called onggi stored in the courtyard and dried, fermented soybean blocks called meju hanging from the ceiling. The Vietnamese restaurant Doi Moi in D.C. sells bottles of many house-made sauces, including a mushroom soy sauce and a sweet soy sauce featured in the restaurant’s drunken noodles.

Sushi by Scratch Restaurants, with a dozen locations around the country, thickens and flavors its house-made soy sauce with the husk from the brown rice that the company mills into its white sushi rice. New York City cafe and bar Round K By owner and chef Ockhyeon Byeon ferments his own ganjang, or Korean soy sauce, before reducing it with sugar and barrel-aging it to create soy syrups that flavor his coffee.

Related: Seafood Trays Are the New Seafood Towers

Making your own soy sauce from scratch is a lot of work. “It is an investment of time and care, but also a rewarding learning experience when the end result is successful,” says Delfin Jaranilla, chef and partner of Brooklyn Mediterranean-inspired restaurant Leland Eating and Drinking House. He uses his own soy sauce sparingly, brushed on a tuna crudo or seasoning a dashi or ponzu.

Mara King, director of fermentation and sustainability at Colorado hospitality group Id Est, makes soy sauce sans soybeans because they’re not widely grown in her region. “We utilize Japanese traditions of growing koji but follow inspiration from Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian practices, focusing on ingredients that are available in Colorado but calling on practices informed by many cultures,” she says. “We sometimes struggle to find names for our ferments that do justice to the cultures our ferments are adjacent to.” Broadly, she calls these related products “amino sauces,” referring to the way koji breaks down proteins into flavorful amino acids.

Her burnt-nut amino sauce, for example, is emulsified into a beurre monté and served over grilled vegetables at the Denver restaurant Hey Kiddo — a technique she learned from a pop-up with another zero-waste restaurant, Silo in London. An amino sauce — made with toasted leftover bread and pinto beans instead of soybeans and cracked wheat — seasons biscuits and gravy at Dry Storage, a bakery and grain mill in Boulder. It’s all in service of Id Est’s mission to use local, seasonal ingredients throughout the year, the preservation of which simultaneously reduces waste and enhances flavor. “Fermentation informs the past, present, and future,” she says.

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