Have you ever noticed the scent of soy sauce?
On Shodoshima, the Japanese island that’s brewed this condiment for four centuries, you’re knocked out by its fragrance whenever you’re near barrels of fermenting beans.
Walk towards Yamaroku Shoyu, for instance, and you’ll be hit by air that’s caramel-thick and deeply salt-scented.
This brewery is run by Yasuo Yamamoto: a fifth-generation soy sauce maker. “The wooden barrels at the entrance to the storehouse have been in use for over 150 years,” he says. “These barrels, crafted by ancestors I never knew, help brew delicious soy sauce.”
The liquid’s salt-lavish flavours are aged for up to four years in traditional kioke barrels. This once-common method is rare during today’s era of hyper-industrialised supermarket convenience: only one per cent of the country’s shoyu (soy sauce) is fermented this way.
You might know this from Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat show, where Yamamoto explained how heavily endangered this craft has become – particularly for artisanal barrel-makers. “In 2009, I placed an order for a barrel, and it was the first order they had received since World War II,” he told the show. “The survival of this soy sauce depends on whether the barrel-making continues.” His dedication to this tradition is incredibly moving. “I fully cried in the soy sauce factory,” Nosrat told me when I interviewed the cookbook author and TV host for SBS.
You might also know Yamaroku Shoyu from Emiko Davies’ latest book, The Japanese Pantry, where she describes the brewery’s kioke: the two-metre tall barrels are so massive, they contain 3,600 litres of soy sauce. Like her, I headed up a wooden ladder to peer over these giant vessels: each one holds dark bubbling liquid – their caramel tones as intense as their developing flavours. The black brews have been aged much longer than the newer mixtures of soybeans and wheat, which are still brown.
On the soy episode of my Should You Really Eat That? podcast for SBS, I described how Yamamoto keeps the craft of kioke-fermented soy sauce alive with his annual summit teaching brewers how to build these barrels. At the brewery, you can see his own handmade efforts.
“This is the very first wooden barrel I made myself in September 2015,” says Yamamoto, referring to a kioke towards the brewery’s back. “It’s still in use today, producing delicious soy sauce without a single leak.”
When you tour Yamaroku Shoyu, you can also taste a variety of in-house soy sauce: some get a flavour boost from Hokkaido seaweed, Kagoshima bonito flakes or the tang of various Japanese citrus fruits.
“Just like quality wine or cheese, large-scale commercial product simply cannot be compared with the complex aroma, flavour and mouthfeel of small-batch, hand-crafted shoyu,” says Jane Lawson, author of Secret Japan. “[Yamamoto’s sauce is] deep and smooth, a little goes a long way.”
Lawson, who has visited the country over 50 times, will be leading a November tour to the Setouchi region where Shodoshima is located. Yamaroku Shoyu’s kura (storehouse) is “alive with wild microbes which influence the unique character of each batch,” she says.
In her book, Davies describes the brewery as “a living museum of microorganisms: there are about 100 varieties of fungi and bacteria living here, in the wood of the enormous cedar barrels, that date back to the Meiji era when the brewing house was built”. As Yamamoto explained on Salt Fat Acid Heat, “I don’t make the soy sauce. The microorganisms make it. I just create an environment where they can thrive.”
One way to deeply appreciate his shoyu is in the brewery’s tea house, where you can drizzle the sauce over plain ice-cream. When you hit a ripple of its rich drops, it is so stunningly good.
“After seeing a Japanese TV show where they poured our soy sauce over vanilla ice cream, we decided to try it ourselves,” Yamamoto says. “It turned out to be surprisingly delicious, so we now serve it to our guests as well.”
You don’t have to travel to Shodoshima to try his shoyu for yourself: Yukino Matsumoto sells it through her Sydney-based Simply Native store and online shop.
“We felt strongly that by introducing their work in Australia, we could play a role in supporting and sustaining this important craft,” she says. “So far, we have sold around 500 bottles in Australia. It’s still a small beginning, but we hope that more people will have the opportunity to experience this remarkable soy sauce, and that it can contribute, even in a small way, to the continuation of Japan’s rich fermentation culture.”
SBS Food is a 24/7 foodie channel for all Australians, with a focus on simple, authentic and everyday food inspiration from cultures everywhere. NSW stream only. Read more about SBS Food
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