Soybean: A popular ingredient of Japanese cuisine

Soybean is a versatile food and one of the central ingredients of Japanese cuisine. It constitutes the basis of many distinctive Japanese flavors, such as soy sauce, miso and tofu. Soybean is also processed into countless Japanese culinary products.

A factory in Saitama, north of Tokyo, still uses the traditional method for making Soy sauce that was inherited 220 years ago by the Fueki family.

It aims to preserve the flavor and quality of their soy sauce through a special fermentation process.

"The three main ingredients to make soy sauce are - soybeans, wheat and salt. In our factory, we use the same traditional method since Edo period and we keep using the same mold in the fermentation process that takes about two years to complete," said Keiichiro Fueki, a Soy Sauce Maker.

The complex biological interaction between the ingredients during fermentation needs to be managed carefully and at the right time, it gets the perfect rich flavour.

It starts from steaming soybeans to decomposing wheat in a mold called koji to heating raw soy sauce in the tank before being processed into bottles. But the key in this traditional process is the wooden fermentation barrel.

"I think the most important ingredient for making Soy sauce is our passion for what we do. We follow the utmost care needed, and traditional technique handed down to us from our ancestors and we hope to pass this passion to the next generation," said Keiichiro Fueki.

Soy sauce appeared in East Asian cuisine more than two thousand years ago.

And now it is considered as the most important Japanese condiment and is used to flavor all types of Japanese dishes. There are countless varieties and regional soy sauces that vary in flavour and colour.

Some of the typical types of soy sauce are regular all-purpose soy sauce like sashimi soy sauce with lighter flavor and color so as not to overpower the flavor of sashimi, and there is even low sodium soy sauce for the more health-conscious.

( With inputs from ANI )

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