Hokkai Kioke Soy Sauce
Introducing Kioke soy sauce
Soy sauce has become a product that can be found in Dutch kitchen cabinets from Domburg to Ameland. We can hardly imagine an Asian dish without this black, salty goodness. Japanese cuisine is also peppered with dishes in which soy sauce is an important, if not the most important flavoring. That there is a big difference in quality is less known to the general public. In the Netherlands, we almost exclusively use industrially produced soy sauce. It is therefore up to us, Hokkai Suisan, to make the Dutch more familiar with a sauce that is not made in anonymous giant factories, but in a traditional and artisanal way, by people who work every day to make the most delicious product possible.
Not only in the Netherlands, but also in Japan is mainly consumed and produced in bulk: there too, soy sauce almost always comes from large factories. After several visits and help from the Japanese government, we managed to start working with the company Adachi, a very special producer. We have since started importing their soy sauce: small-scale and prepared in the traditional way. We were allowed to collaborate on a sauce that exactly meets our taste: the organic Hokkai Kioke soy sauce.
How it’s made
Here we would like to tell you a little more about the background of this wonderful sauce. Soy sauce is almost always made from 4 ingredients: soybeans, grain, salt and a fungal culture.
Soy sauce is created by first steaming soybeans and roasting wheat. From these two products, a mixture is made to which yeast, or “koji,” is added. This mixture is then mixed with salt water and transferred into wooden barrels. There, a complicated and lengthy process begins: the mixture ferments and matures. For a soy sauce brewer, those added fungi are actually his most important employees. This is because the fungal culture very slowly turns the original paste into soy sauce and gives the sauce its amazing flavor full of umami. Consequently, one the brewers we worked with once uttered the magic words: ‘I don’t make this soy sauce myself, my koji do’.
Wooden barrels for premium brewing
Kioke soy sauce, our soy sauce, differs from industrially brewed sauce in a number of very important ways. First, the ingredients are specially grown organic soybeans, primarily from Japan. We use the whole bean and not the soybean meal used to make industrial soy sauce.
In addition, normal soy sauce is brewed almost exclusively in immense stainless steel tanks. “Kioke” means “wooden vessel. Only 1% of Japan’s soy sauce is still made in kioke. Maturing the soy sauce in these wooden barrels creates a fuller, more intense flavor.
Finally, time is a very important factor. Ordinary soy sauce is fermented and aged under the “perfect” conditions. The tanks are in a room where the temperature and humidity are artificially regulated. This ensures that the sauce is ready in more or less three months. We don’t. Because it is sometimes very hot and sometimes very cold in Japan, that fermentation often ends up taking more than a year (and sometimes two) before we can start bottling.
Working with Adachi Jozo
It is an honor to make this sauce with the owners of Adachi. We get a lot of inspiration from the fact that this company, like Hokkai Suisan, is a family business. They have been making soy sauce for four generations, and now the youngest generation is at the helm. The two brothers are both in their thirties and have sky-high ambitions. They want the whole world to taste real soy sauce. You understand, we quickly became friends with each other.