The soy reduction is a syrupy, smoky, umami bomb that my kids and students affectionately
call the magic sauce. I learned to make it while studying Japanese cooking with Elizabeth
Andoh in Tokyo many years ago. I put it on everything -- raw fish, cooked fish, eggs,
veggies, and even soups. I made a video about this sauce in 2014, but I want to give you
an updated version.
What changed over the years is not the final result, but the procedure. I dropped a few
ingredients and changed how I reduce the sauce to make it faster and easier.
What scares people about this type of recipe are the ingredients, so let’s go through
them one by one. Tamari style soy sauce is found in all supermarkets. If you can’t
find it, use whatever soy sauce you have. Sake is found in every liquor store. No need
for anything expensive. Mine is roughly $10 a bottle or box. The leftovers can be stored
in the fridge almont indefinitely to use for other cooking projects. Dry shiitake mushrooms
are found in most supermarkets. Kombu or Kelp is a thick seaweed and bonito flakes are the
shavings of smoked bonito, which is tuna’s little cousin. Kombu and bonito flakes might
be hard to find in your regular supermarket. But any Asian store and Amazon carry them.
All these ingredients are completely non perishable and can sit in your pantry forever.
If you want an American supermarket version of this sauce, you can skip the mushrooms,
kombu, and bonito flakes and replace the sake with dry white wine. It would still be a tasty
sauce, but way less aromatic. The ingredient I would miss the most would be the bonito
flakes. That’s what gives the sauce its smokiness. So if you need to prioritize your
unusual ingredient shopping that’s the one I would give the first priority to.
In the description below the video, you’ll find this recipe both by weight and by volume.
This isn’t baking so precise measurements aren’t important.
Pour one 10oz bottle of soy sauce into a small pot.
Add 300g of sake, 85g of sugar,
5g of kombu, 15g of dry shiitake mushrooms,
and 10g of bonito flakes. It’s completely fine to eyeball the kombu, mushrooms, and
bonito flakes.
Stir the ingredients together to help the sugar dissolve. Set the pot over medium heat
and bring to a simmer. Turn down the heat to very low and cook gently for 10 min. Cover
the pot, take it off the heat, and let sit for 1 hour, though longer is fine. This will
help the kombu, mushrooms, and bonito flakes infuse the sauce with their aroma.
Strain the sauce through a fine mesh strainer into a non-stick skillet. Use a ladle to press
on the solids to get as much sauce out of them as possible. I discard the solids, but
if you want to get another use out of them, cover them with hot water, let sit for 10
minutes and strain. You can then use this broth for marinating soft boiled eggs. That’s
the eggs you see on top of ramen bowls.
Now we need to boil our sauce to turn it into a very thick syrup. This is a good time to
put a plate in the freezer. We’ll use it to test the viscosity of the sauce. Turn up
the heat to high until you get a boil. Regulate the heat so that the sauce bubbles vigorously,
but doesn’t buttle out of the pan. In the original recipe this step was done in the
little pot with all the other ingredients, but that method had some drawbacks. A pot
didn’t allow evaporation to happen nearly as quickly as a skillet so this step took
longer and required more of my attention. Another problem was straining the sauce after
it was thick and syrupy. I felt like I was losing some sauce because it was stuck to
the pot and to the solids. Since we got our dry ingredients out before the reduction and
switched to a non-stick pan, we’ll get to keep more sauce.
How long the sauce will take to reduce depends on the size of your skillet and the output
of your burner. I am using a 12 inch skillet on a pretty strong burner, so it usually takes
about 15 minutes. But this is just to give you an order or magnitude number. During this
stage, you really don’t want to leave the sauce unattended. It’s like making caramel.
At first nothing happens and suddenly it moves at a lightning speed.
When it starts to look thick, give it a stir with a wooden spoon or a silicone spatula.
Put a few drops of sauce onto your chilled plate. This will cool it quickly enough for
you to see what it will be like after refrigeration. Drag a spatula or a spoon through it and see
if it holds its shape. I know it’s not an appetizing analogy, but it should feel a bit
like glue. See how it stays put and doesn’t fill the gap that my spoon has created. By
the way, under no circumstances should you taste it straight from the pan or lick the
spoon. You’ll get a terrible burn.
As soon as you get the right consistency, take the pan off heat. Cool it slightly and
pour into a glass measuring cup with a pouring spout. Don’t wait for the sauce to get to
room temperature since it will thicken significantly and will become harder to pour. I usually
get around 200ml of sauce which is slightly under 1 cup.
Now we need to get it to room temperature and then move it into a squeeze bottle. The
squeeze bottle is an absolute must. This sauce is very intense and that’s the only good
way to ensure that you won’t overwhelm your dish with it.
By the way, tasting it at this point is useless. I know you are curious about how it came out,
but it will not taste good. It will be overly salty, sweet, and bitter and possibly even
a tad grainy from the sugar crystallization during the reduction. All of that is normal.
Put it into the fridge overnight and the next day it will mellow out and smooth out. The
sauce will keep forever in your fridge. Just keep the top of the squeeze bottle wrapped
with plastic wrap.
Sweet, sour,
salty, bitter
and umami -- all the five tastes boiled down together and infused with smoke. Need I say
more?
Here are more very detailed culinary tutorials for you to check out and a link to my online
classes is in the description below.