Soy sauce, a flavorful condiment and preservative, is a mainstay of Chinese cooking. It is made by boiling and fermenting soybeans, which are then covered with salted water for several weeks, resulting in a thin, reddish-brown liquid whose primary flavors are salt and umami.
Soybeans have been cultivated in China for thousands of years. A highly versatile crop, it can be pickled or fermented; soaked and ground to make soy milk; curdled to make tofu, or even used as a fertilizer. Outside of China, it is perhaps most famous as the primary ingredient in soy sauce.
A soy sauce brewery in China
Soy sauce`s predecessor was an earlier seasoning known as jiang. By the late Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BCE), jiang was a savory paste made from fermenting meat, fish or grain. In the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), those ingredients were replaced by soybeans, which were much more accessible because there were easy to harvest, even on poor land.
During the Han period, soybeans were fermented to make a paste called douchi, which consisted of salted, semi-fermented soybeans. It was this douchi that eventually evolved into soy sauce. It became known by its modern Chinese name, jiangyou, by the Song dynasty (960-1279).
Sometime during the 13th century, soybean fermentation was also introduced to Japan through Buddhist monks. (In fact, the English name for soy sauce is derived from its Japanese name, shoyu.) The cross-cultural spread of soy sauce meant that it eventually became a key ingredient in the cuisines of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as well. By the 17th and 18th centuries, soy sauce had spread to the West, and eventually became one of the components of