Have you ever had real soy sauce?
The answer is probably "no".
Most fermented products we consume in our part of the world are highly industrialized. Big food soy sauce and miso are made from defatted soy protein which is also commonly used as animal feed. This industrial waste product is boiled in hydrochloric acid to extract the proteins. It is then neutralized with colouring and flavour is added through MSG and other chemicals. These products are made in the span of hours and days. Real soy sauce and real miso take months and even years to be made naturally, allowing time to let the microbes do the work.
That's what we do.
All our ferments start by soaking and steaming soybeans and other legumes we source from organic farmers in BC and Quebec. After adding either rice koji or barley koji -a manual process of carefully incubating and monitoring that takes 72 hours in our special koji room- our misos ferment 12+ months until they've reached the flavour profile we're after. No one batch of miso is exactly the same. For us, quality is not about absolute consistency, but about continuous improvement guided by our taste buds.
Let us shoyu the way.
Our soy sauce is a true labour of love. After the soybeans have been soaked and transformed into koji using our special strain of Aspergillus Sojae, the koji is mixed with toasted and cracked organic BC soft wheat berries. Both the toasting and cracking is done by hand in small batches to reach the exact colouring we are after. The wheat is mixed with the koji and placed in Okanagan red wine barrels together with a salt brine. Next, all we add is time and love.
The barrels are stirred by hand almost daily at the start, and less frequently as the fermentatio progresses. We whisper loving words of encouragement into our barrels, as we coax the magic mould to do its job and break down the proteins, carbohydrates and fatty acids into complex and deep umami flavours, unique aromas akin to great whiskey, aged wine and fresh coffee, and a silky smooth texture.
After 12 months of patience and love, we press the contents of the barrels by hand with a wooden cider press. The soy sauce is then left to rest to continue to develop its complex, deep umami flavours and distinct bright amber hue. The soy sauce is now ready to be bottled and labelled -again, by hand-, earning the stamp of approval from Kanada Shoyu.
