First you smell, then you see, then you eat. That’s a saying you hear a lot around tables and kitchens in Asia. But, during my childhood in Sibu, Malaysia, it was less an idle maxim than a way of life. It seemed an almost daily occurrence that before I even got my shoes off or set down my backpack, the aromas drifting from the kitchen signaled that my mom, grandma and plenty of aunts were making magic at the stove.
I didn’t think much of it at the time; I was just hungry. Besides, a near-reverence for food is par for the course in the Baba-Nonya culture that formed the backdrop to my Malaysian youth. But, now that I am chef and co-owner of Betelnut Pejiu Wu, San Francisco, I marvel at the range of flavors and aromas—from charred wood smoke to tongue-tingling spice—that my mom and aunts created with little more than instinct and a pantry full of staples. At that pantry’s core is a battery of fermented sauces that give Asian cuisines from Singapore to Sapporo their heart and soul.
A different kind of mother
I am sometimes amused by the mythic stature that we chefs assign to sauces. Just consider Antonin Carême’s hallowed “mother sauces,” and you see my point. But our admiration isn’t misplaced. A well-made velouté or espagnole can make or break a French dish, and the same can be said for the effect of a fine fish sauce or artisanal shoyu on a Vietnamese or Japanese meal’s success.
But, where the classic French sauce derives its character from the careful browning of the bones, a measured reduction of the stock and the proper development of the roux, most of Asia’s “mother sauces” gain their flavor via an entirely different route.
That difference is fermentation. No stranger to French cuisine—just consider wine and bread—fermentation is a universal tool that cultures and cuisines have harnessed for millennia, not only to prolong a food’s life, but to intensify its flavor. When compounds like sugars and proteins break down during fermentation, they liberate smaller byproducts that completely change the starting material’s sensory “personality.” And so it goes with fermentation of Asian sauces.
Naturally brewed goodness
Take the production of one of Asia’s most fundamental sauces, and perhaps that most familiar to Western audiences: soy sauce. Shoyu, as the Japanese call it, is the soybean’s bid at immortality.
In natural-brewing tradition, manufacturers begin by making koji. Under controlled conditions, they inoculate a select blend of soybeans and wheat with the seed mold Aspergillus oryzae. This mixture then matures for three days in well-ventilated vats, and the resulting koji culture is blended with salted water to produce a mash called moromi. The moromi then undergoes several months of fermentation, during which salt-loving lactic-acid bacteria and yeasts mature it into a semi-liquid, ruddy-colored “mature mash” that boasts many of the flavors and aromas that give naturally brewed soy sauce its fingerprint.
