Ohsawa Nama Shoyu has been my go-to for decades
https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Mine-Natural-Food-Co/dp/B0019LA7...
I delved into the world of soy sauce a few years back and id say if your looking to go beyond kikkoman, or god forbid that swill they call la choy, go for kimlan. super special, I-Jen (for something a little different), light, or aged..pearl river bridge isn't too bad either just watch out for brands with a bunch of added chemicals in the ingredients
or god forbid that swill they call la choy
An interesting note: La Choy is synthetically fermented (whatever what means!) and is usually the only alcohol-free option for those with medical or religious restrictions on the consumption of alcohol. Soy sauce is specifically listed as something recovering alcoholics taking Antabuse should avoid [1], though I've read it only rarely triggers any reaction. But there is a sometimes a reason for La Choy!
[1] https://advantagetherapy.com.au/the-impact-of-antabuse-on-al...
Pearl River Bridge has a seasoned soy sauce that's been my constant for over a decade.
Which prepared foods show off the qualities of the soy sauce best?
I feel like in most of my cooking the soy sauce is overpowered.
This is a good question. I would offer that there are at least two major types of soy sauce: light and dark. They are used in a variety of ways in Northeast Asian cooking (Mainland China, Koreas, Japan, Taiwan, Hongkong, Macao). For example, when you steam a fish (southern Chinese/Canto style), you use a combination of light and dark soy sauces. (I have no idea why, but this is a traditional recipe taught to me years ago.) Soy sauce has two primary "taste" components (previously I discussed visual components): (a) the fermented soy beans and (b) the umami (MSG/monosodium glutamate). Even if you feel like (a) is overwhelmed by your cooking, it is still enhanced by (b) which, for most people, makes any savory food taste more appealing.
For me, nothing beats raw fish (sashimi or sushi) as a taste test for a soy sauce, but I frequently use a mixture with Japanese ponzu... so ignore any expertise that I have on the matter! I am sure that each culinary region in Northeast Asia will have a different answer. You could probably interview 100 chefs from the region and get 25 different answers.
Lastly, there is a third type of soy sauce used in Southeast Asia called sweet soy sauce, or kecap manis in Bahasa Melayu/Indonesia.
Surely, "salt" has to be mentioned when talking about the primary taste components of soy? Normal soy is around 17% salt, which is a lot and really plays a part, in my opinion.
Soy sauce is meant to largely replace the salt component of your dish. If you're using so much that it's particularly salty, you're using too much.
Way back in the day, when salt was scarce and expensive, the whole point of stuff like fish sauce, miso, soy sauce, etc... was to provide salt but also cut it by adding other ingredients.
Kecap manis is delicious, I get the ABC brand. It's as thick as molasses. Wonderful drizzled over some chicken rice
Oh, sweet soy sauce is a thing in Asia? I thought it was a French invention (all restaurants here give you both savory and sweet soy sauce).
Also I just had gyozas with Lee Kum Kee light soy sauce and thought it's a good test for it.
plain white rice is a good vessel
Once you step outside the usual suspects like Kikkoman, there's a whole world of nuance out there.
Will vouch for Kimlan, my late mother's favorite!
La choy is to soy sauce what Maruchen is to real ramen or Kraft to French cheese. Try San J, available in most 'health' grocers, eg Food Hole, Sprouts, etc. it's not fine, but it's good.
> La choy is to soy sauce what Maruchen is to real ramen
Oh come on now, surely Maruchan deserves a bit more credit...at the very least, no one is breaking the bank while desecrating their soul.
In contrast, at my local Walmart, a 15-oz bottle of La Choy is priced +50% higher than its (subjectively superior) Kikkoman alternative of the same size!
I'm enjoying the throes of salmonella presently and it all seems unappealing. The fucking pain. But even in this wretched state, I have some memory of desire for Paldo, but none for Maruchan.
Yeah, I'm in genuine agony, probably preparing to puke from all holes, and I'm reading HN... while writhing and moaning.
I guess you could say I'm sick. And so is la choy
https://www.seriouseats.com/do-you-know-your-soy-sauces-japa...
There are lots of different types of soy sauce catering to different uses.
Fermentation is such wonderful technology. It both preserves and makes things more delicious.
I got into making hot sauces recently. I didn't really care for any of the results until I started fermenting them. Chop up ingredients, add brine, put everything in a jar with a fermentation lid that allows gas to escape. Then let it sit on the counter for a week or two. blend and maybe add a bit of vinegar. That's the basic process, and in my humble opinion, it's the absolute best way to make hot sauce
(YMMV, do your own research, there are obviously risks to letting food sit out at room temperature for two weeks)
It's kinda wild how fermentation does both - keeps food from going bad and somehow makes it taste better. Like, who figured that out and thought, "Yeah, let’s just let this sit and see what happens"?
Arguably our tastes evolved or adapted to enjoy the flavors of fermentation. And it's not universal: a lot of people don't like the smell of cheese, or natto, or even cucumber pickles. I love them all!
"let's make this stuff go bad, but in a good way" and somehow humans created cheese, soy sauce, wine, bread, pickles, chocolate...
Isn't it more 'let's store this surplus' - then 'oh man it looks and smells different now but somehow better'.
For example cheese was likely discovered when people tried transporting milk in water carrying bags made from sheep stomachs. While carrying water in them would be fine, putting milk in there for a couple of unrefrigerated days would lead to cheese from the rennet in sheep's stomach that would stay on in the vessel, even after it has been cleaned and even dried.
Same with wine - let's store some fruit juices - it is pretty hard NOT to make wine unless you know about pasteurisation, and even if you do boil it, there are so many natural yeasts just ready to make wine.
Grains that get wet actively want to produce beer :)
Wholemeal flour is chock full of wild yeasts, and wants to become a sourdough starter if you just give it a little water and time.
So much of human society relies on the byproducts of other organisms. Pickles, bread, antibiotics.
Yoghurt + Kefir + Kumis.
Golden Horde conquered the known world fueled by milk byproducts.
Surely alcohol is by far the biggest example.
Aside but I've always hated the phrase "known world". It means "known to the Europeans"
I think in this instance it means "known to the Mongols"
"Known world" in the context of history usually means Eurasia + Africa. Basically all the places that aren't the new world and random islands in the middle of nowhere.
It also makes things rotten. The difference between spoilage and fermentation/aging is whether humans like the result at the end.
> The difference between spoilage and fermentation/aging is whether humans like the result at the end
Is not whether it makes humans unwell quite an important factor..
Liking the result at the end in a qualifier that encompasses "does not make me ill", "does not taste terrible", and various other factors.
Edit: nvm
The difference is whether humans get ill or not.
People get ill from alcohol, yet it's called fermentation.
No, people get ill from excessive quantities of alcohol.
Acetaldehyde is always toxic, so no, they always get sick, just less sick.
Getting drunk is literally poisoning yourself. Some humans just happen to enjoy the symptoms of said poison.
Kind of reminds me of dolphins taking turns chewing on pufferfish, apparently for fun/altered states.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-seem-to-u...
Most people aren't getting drunk every time they drink.
Try wine and grape juice side by side. Baring truly awful wine, the wine will taste better (I suppose you could have awful grape juice too, but, you get the idea).
> Try wine and grape juice side by side. Baring truly awful wine, the wine will taste better
The unfermented juice of wine grapes has many similarities to the wine it would produce if fermented. "Grape juice" is usually pretty one note, just sweet.
Taste is subjective. To people not used to consuming any alcohol the wine might taste worse than plain grape juice.
Context and experience shape so much of how we taste things
Sure, but it's a taste people have spent a couple thousand years working on, and it's remained popular through huge changes in culture and diet. People clearly like it.
Some people, sure, but not all people.
If you hate the taste of alcohol (like me), I think the grape juice would taste better
I like beer and I think the taste of wine is absolutely vile.
Sure, but if alcohol didn't get you drunk consumption would plummet 95%.
I wouldn't be so sure... I'm certain my own would increase. (Assuming 'get you drunk' means something like 'contain ethanol' i.e. no 'buzz' or whatever but also no adverse effect on liver, the next day, ...).
If you want a cold drink that isn't sweet, your choices are pretty much alcohol, alcohol-free alternative, water.
Tea and coffee don't have to be sweet either, and there are lots of cold versions of those.
Also plenty of traditional cold drinks that are savoury or can be savoury: doogh, ayran, lassi, jaljeera, buttermilk, kvass
I guess simply 'milk' I also missed, which is a bit sweet of course but I wasn't intending to lump it in with fruit juices and added-sugar drinks.
I did almost mention jaljeera, but thought that might be a bit niche. It is also often sweetened though. I've never known not-sweet lassi though? Salted lassi is still sweet underneath, like salted caramel, ime. We could count it with the sweet-ish milk drinks, anyway.
I’ll add legumes juices : both raw, fresh blend or the water from a soup that you separate and put in a fridge. Those are delicious.
Kvaas contain alcohol, doesn’t it?
Of about kefir percentage. Kwas has 0.5-1.5% ABV, kefir has 0.02-2.0% ABV.
> Kvaas contain alcohol, doesn’t it?
I think only as much as kombucha, not enough to cause a buzz
To be fair, the concept of iced tea as an objective desire is considered the provenance of blasphemous original sin by a not insignificant percentage of natives where the parent hails from.
>If you want a cold drink that isn't sweet, your choices are pretty much alcohol, alcohol-free alternative, water.
Uh, no.
There's also seltzer, flavored seltzer, flavored water, iced tea, iced coffee, herbal infusions (like hibiscus, rooibos, honeybush, etc), broth, milk and plant based milk alternatives, and fermented drinks like kombucha + kefir. That's just off the top of my head.
Hibiscus even has the benefit of helping regulate blood pressure.
I almost never drink sweet drinks or plain water and rarely drink alcohol. My fluid consumption is almost entirely: hot tea, iced tea, kombucha, and hibiscus infusion. Sometimes seltzer. Sometimes coffee.
That seems unlikely. Non alcoholic drinks are already an enormous market, and people would have less reason to limit consumption with the health downside removed.
Totally agree. I love beer. I just love it. I would drink beer all day if it didn’t have that damned alcohol in it.
I like alcohol too, but not nearly as much as I like beer. Kinda sounds nonsensical, but that’s how I feel!
The dose makes the poison.
Same could be said of fire and burnt food
What is fermentation really? It is a process whereby bacteria et al. process a food source, breaking it down. And the same process goes on inside your gut. Ouch, now there is spoilage for you!
There is at least some research that says fermented foods have some benefits including reducing inflammation. My personal guess based on subjecting myself to more and more fermenting foods is that much of the obesity and many of the common health issues have to do with not eating enough fermenting foods. Just a guess based on a sample of one.
In the case of this style of korean soy sauce, it is actually fungal enzymes from molds that colonized the meju slowly breaking down the proteins and starches over time, whilst being protected from outside forces by high salinity water. I realize you said "et al." but I couldn't help myself. There's very little bacterial activity going on in there.
AS far as downsides go. Don't koreans have a much higher incidence of bowl cancer due to a bad bacteria that can pop up during fermentation?
No, fermentation is a process of enzymatic transformation.
Black tea is fermented, for example. No need for bacteria.
I have to disagree: black tea only had an oxidation while fermented tea had an oxidation plus a fermentation by microbial activity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_tea
The term "fermentation" is very often used buy common language to describe both fungic and microbial activity.
The line between spoiled and fermented… blurs, at times.
What point are you even trying to make? The difference between gone bad and fermented is pretty obvious, but fine, don’t eat anything fermented if you like.
I’ll be over here enjoying cheese, kimchi, beer, miso, pickles, sauerkraut, etc etc etc
chocolate
TIL! I had no idea chocolate-making involves fermentation. Turns out fermenting the beans is highly involved in producing the characteristic flavor.
Coffee, similarly
And veggies and meat begin decaying the moment they die. So what?
The difference between spoilage and fermentation is whether it’s spoiled.
So is it like tamari? Seems to be made from fermented soybean paste, which is how tamari is made too (byproduct of miso paste).
Most of the soy sauce you encounter in the US has wheat, while in Japan (and seemingly South Korea) there's no wheat added.
Personally once I switched to tamari I never went back to "regular" soy sauce, the flavor is quite a bit richer and more versatile in cooking, in my opinion.
> Most of the soy sauce you encounter in the US has wheat, while in Japan (and seemingly South Korea) there's no wheat added.
This is incorrect with regards to Japan. Shoyu is made with wheat. Tamari is not. Their production process is different.
Kikkoman is the most popular brand in the West AND in Japan, which is a koikuchi shoyu, which is the "standard" shoyu type in Japan. It is made with wheat.
The Kikkoman gluten free variant is also labelled as tamari.
For me I always have Kikkoman in the fridge (especially because thats what wife grew up with) as the staple soy sauce. I like to dabble in having 1-2 other variants in the fridge at once, but they can tend to have too strong a flavor for some peoples taste. Or certain variants are best with certain dishes, etc.
This is the first time I hear about keeping soy sauce in the fridge. Is this common?
I have feeling that I should do it. The difference between open bottle that have stayed outside and fresh bottle is pretty clear. Refrigeration would slow down any reactions and thus keep taste better longer.
Every soy sauce label I remember seeing has said, "Refrigerate after opening." I don't know why this seems to be rarely done (at least in the US).
Yeah I just follow food safety instructions on packaging
I keep sweet soy like kecap manis and 醬油膏 in the fridge because occasionally it can catch mold otherwise. I do the same with sweet vinegar like balsamic. However I think this depends a lot on how hot and humid your environment is. In cool and dry climates it's probably not necessary.
醬油膏 = soy sauce paste
It’s one of my favorites. I try to find ones without much additives and refrigerate after opening to keep it fresh.
Yes, and Chinese "light soy" is also similar to shoyu.
I was under the impression that traditional Japanese soy sauce (shoyu, not tamari) also contains wheat (close to 50/50 ratio) - it's used to help start the fermentation.
It does, when it doesn't that's when you call it tamari.
Tamari is "low wheat" rather than specifically "no wheat". Many manufacturers (particularly when selling to Western markets) will simply take the extra steps to expand the market.
Eh, it depends what you mean by traditional. Ramen is "traditional" in japan, but it was invented in the early 1900s. Similarly, since wheat wasn't commonly imported into japan prior to the 1800s, most actually old tradition recipes didn't contain wheat either.
> Most of the soy sauce you encounter in the US has wheat, while in Japan (and seemingly South Korea) there's no wheat added.
My favourite jang is made from fermented wheat and soy - chunjang. Chunjang is the star ingredient in one of the most delicious noodle dishes ever conceived, Jjajangmyeon.
buldak ramen introduced me to jjajang. I stir fry 1 of them and one 2x spicy together with green and yellow onion, red pepper, garlic, ginger, and whatever leftover protein I have from the week. top with some type of Lao Gan Ma and there is basically no reason to ever order takeout
If other readers are unfamiliar with "Lao Gan Ma", it is a brand of spicy and fermented pastes from Mainland China. I highly recommend them. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_Gan_Ma
Once I had to switch to tamari due to a celiac diagnosis, I found it was one of the few things that actually tastes better without gluten. I think most of the world would enjoy soy sauce made without wheat more if they tried it.
Also, most soy sauce in Japan absolutely has wheat unfortunately.
Almost all wheat based soy sauces has such a low gluten content that they can be seen as gluten free.
Would someone with gluten sensitivity agree with this statement?
This information comes from the Swedish food authority: https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/matvanor-halsa--miljo/sjukdo...
My kid with Celiak disease eat "normal" soy sauces and have passed all test so far.
Good question... I think they're pretty different in taste and how they're made (which is why they taste so different)
Miso and "dwen jang" taste very different because miso is usually mixed with soybean and rice, whereas dwen jang is all soybean. They are also aged differently. Miso is packed into more air tight container, whereas dwen jang is shaped into a block, hung outside to air dry.
The block to hang up outside for air drying is called 메주 (meju) which is form before made into 된장 (dwenjang). There is more process involved to make it into dwenjang. Actually from that meju we make daenjang and soy sauce.
I've really come to appreciate daenjang more than Japanese miso over time. It has funkier, earthier but arguably less refined taste than Japanese miso.
Same. Tamari seems to have a much richer flavor than soy sauce. I would recommend others try it a replacement.
Western tastes favor intense flavors, so tamari may provide better balance than standard (koikuchi) soy sauce in that sense, but in Japanese cooking, "richness" is not necessarily a desirable characteristic, and tamari would overwhelm many dishes when substituted for koikuchi in similar amounts. Reprocessed (sai-shikomi) soy sauce, made by fermenting soy sauce twice, is considered a middle ground between koikuchi and tamari in terms of richness and is popular for dipping. But there is also a relatively wide range of flavor within the koikuchi category, and the US-made Kikkoman sauce that many people are familiar with is not very flavorful.
What a ridiculous generalisation. Much of French and Italian cuisine is subtle in its flavourings. What about Sichuan or Korean spicy food? Some of that stuff can knock your socks off the flavours are so strong. And don't get me started about Malaysian or Indonesian food.> Western tastes favor intense flavorsThat's why I expressed a generalization and not a universal statement. You don't have to prop up a strawman to express disagreement.
Lots of good recommendations here, but I'll add mine which is Zhongba 1 year fermented light soy sauce. The long fermentation time and the addition of a specific white mushroom (口蘑 (kǒumó)) gives it a somewhat unique deep flavour without too much saltiness.
Great for dishes where the primary taste is from the soy sauce.
It's interesting they mention charcoal purification, there is this plant that Japanese people eat (like wild green tubes with leaves) and they soak it in water with wood ash from a fire.
I believe (more likely, chatgpt believes) this plant is Warabi. I didn't know it was processed with charcoal purification!
The process sounds similar to how I use something acidic to process the toxins from Taro leaves before eating them.
Yeah that looks right, long tubes. Another one I see a guy foraging/eating is a big leaf called "strawberry something" and he batters it up/fries it, interesting.
> I believe (more likely, chatgpt believes)
Possibly the most depressing thing I've read all week... :sigh:
Sorry instead of "googling" this plant up, I used ChatGPT to tell me candidates on what this plant might be.
Just don't tell people where you got the info until it's normalized to ask AIs.
Honestly, while LLMs hallucinate, they still return more reliable info than using Google and getting the info from an SEO spam blog post that played Chinese whispers with already wrong info from ten other blogs.
The only difference is that using Google is normalized, so you wouldn't have felt the need to announce it.
Of course, unless you personally feel the info is reliable, you probably shouldn't post it no matter where you got it from.
> getting the info from an SEO spam blog post that played Chinese whispers with already wrong info from ten other blogs.
Didn't you just perfectly describe the ChatGPT training set?
It's like a hash table. You get a result quick, but you still have to check that the key is actually equal to what you asked for.
How would traditional taste to someone who has spent their life on mass produced kikoman?
Kikkoman USA has been brewing a lighter soy sauce in Wisconsin for the U.S. market for a few decades while now. It’s what most people in the U.S. think of when they hear “Kikkoman”.
Specialty markets sell imported Kikkoman products, such as “traditionally brewed” soy sauce which tastes stronger. Note that “stronger” doesn’t mean “better”: Asian consumers are used to using different styles of soy sauce as they see fit. U.S. consumers still largely view soy sauce as a single thing with no variation except maybe “low sodium”. Definitely worth exploring the different varieties.
There's no one "traditional" soy sauce. It's kind of like wine. If you live your life only drinking sweet port wines straight from the bottle, you'll think a dry white wine is gross if you use it the same way. But if you're making a cream pasta or some sort of fish, you'll quickly realize white wine--and every wine--has its place.
For example, I find kikkoman to be absolutely awful for fried rice. It has an oddly sharp taste that just doesn't work. Chinese soy sauces don't have that sharpness but have a very wide and smooth savoriness that works well with fried rice. But if you try Chinese soy sauce with sashimi, it tastes flat and very wrong. That sharpness of a Japanese soy sauce works better, and a high quality Japanese soy sauce has a milder sharpness that emphasizes the fish flavors but not so weak that it makes the flavor weird like a Chinese soy sauce would.
I grew up on kikkoman, view it as the soy sauce equivalent of Heinz ketchup or Best Foods/Hellmans mayonnaise and still cook with it all the time. But after tasting a wide variety of soy sauce I would describe kikkoman's profile as salty, metallic and stout-beer like. The fancier soy sauces seem less salty (despite similar amounts of sodium) and can have varying notes of oyster sauce, seafood, sweetness, coffee, molasses and MSG.
Not sure about using Heinz ketchup as an example. To me there are cheap ketchups that taste worse, and fancy yuppie ketchups that taste different for 2-5x the price, but nothing really tastes genuinely better.
Ketchup is like a staple unobjectionable thing to stock in the fridge for kids/guests/comfort. Stocking a weird one kind of defeats the purpose.
I'd rather try various steak / bbq / teriyaki / whatever sauces that set out to be categorically different.
I haven't read this in a while, but remember this Malcom Gladwell article discussing why other ketchups haven't had much success:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...
Great snippet -
“The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s”— and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—“all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.”
Here's an unpaywalled PDF I found of the same: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/gilden/files/2016/04/theketchupco...
Person endorsement for Sir Kensington's ketchup. I find it to be a noticeable improvement over Heinz.
Yes! Heinz is coke. Hunts is Pepsi. Everything else is usually lesser.
Yes for me theres a whole variety of low-brow staple packaged processed foods I think we've all sort of imprinted upon a certain flavor profile growing up.
I'd rather explore entirely other flavors/categories than spend 4x on some fancy knockoff to signal I'm low brow high end. Extremely diminishing returns, and mostly just tastes different.
I don't need a $4 replacement for a Coke or a $5 Mac-n-cheese or a $10 bottle of ketchup.
Honestly we should all be buying less of these processed foods, not going further upmarket with them.
Don't forget French's (is it the RC Cola of ketchups?)
YES!
Citi Field used to serve French’s. Which is odd because they were doing Mike’s mustard… money talks I suppose.
My son who was little was like “dad, there’s something wrong with my hot dog.” I tried it, and yes, something was terribly wrong. That stuff tastes like they put tomato flavor in strawberry jam.
I never knew it and will immediately forget it lol
I started buying Kikkoman's "whole bean" soy sauce (I don't remember what it's called in Japanese: maroyaka?), because I found a local Asian mart carried it, and it was reasonably priced. Seems you can find it on Amazon these days, even:
https://www.amazon.com/Kikkoman-Maroyaka-Sauce-33-8-Ounce-Pa...
Haven't compared it side-by-side with the normal stuff, but anecdotally it tasted a little more mellow to my palette, and I will probably continue using it moving forward when my 1L bottle runs out.
Are there any brands of soy sauce that could be commonly (even if its in an Asian market) found in the states that you would recommend?
Pearl River Bridge makes pretty good Chinese style soy sauces and seems readily available, at least in the PNW. I use the light and dark sauces a lot in cooking.
One that we use at home and could be available is the Sempio 'green' soy sauce with 25% less salt.
Kikkoman has a double-fermented soy sauce in their product line, brewing starts with their regular soy sauce instead of salt water. The flavor is much deeper and more complex, it's actually less salty than regular soy sauce.
Have they thought about triple fermenting? Quadruple?
Another commentor suggests this is more like tamari than soy sauce. If it is, expect a similar but more intense flavor and an especially long after taste. It's hard to describe the more intense flavor. It's like if you only taste soy sauce with the center of your tongue, you taste tamari with the tip, center and sides.
Probably like tasting a whole different thing. Traditional soy sauce hits way differently, it’s not just salty, it’s got layers
Try Pearl River Bridge Light soy sauce. Is the default recommended light soy sauce for a lot of asian cooking, and easy to find.
You'll like it better than the harsh flavor of Kikkoman
Salty
So let me take a detour that I promise will get back to the soy sauce.
Recently New York Magazine came out with an article about so-called "West Village girls" [1]. For anyone unfamiliar, the West Village (and Greenwich Village more broadly) is a part of Manhattan below 14th street that had huge cultural significance int eh 20th century. Many musicians, artists and luminaries lived there for a time. It was the home of the Stonewall riots [2] and is otherwise important to LGTBQ culture.
The West Village girl is pretty much the opposite of all those things. Basic, typically white, posts on IG that "I can't live without my Starbuck's", dresses generically, is chasing her Sex and the City dream, is likely supported by her parents in her 20s after graduating college (if not outright having a trust fund) and probably has hobbies like "travel" and "eating out".
There is a long history of a certain kind of (typically white) people who are devoid of "culture" and move to a place and make it worse by not respecting that culture, like moving above a Mexican restaurant or a bar that's been there for 40 years and geting it shut down for noise. That sort of thing.
This segment is typically obsessed with finding "the best", seeing and being seen at the "best" or just the "hippest" places and so on.
I saw a thing recently about people who travel for an hour plus to find the "best" New York slice. The particular creator explained that these chasers just don't get the point. The point is that you can get good slices pretty much anywhere in NYC. It's ubiquitous. You just don't need to line up for 2 hours at some hole-in-the-wall in Queens or whatever.
And now I'll bring it back to soy sauce.
This seems to fit this obsession of finding or having "the best". For me, the difference between "good" and "the best" for pretty much anything is so marginal that it's never worth paying a huge premium, going terribly out of your way and/or waiting for a long time. That goes for restaurants, food items, wine and pretty much anything.
But every time I see people who obsess over "the best" it always strikes me as so sad, like these chasers just have to have the external validation of being "in the club". I particularly see this with people who are obsessed with Japan, like they look for the absolute best sushi, omikase or whatever but again, I think the point of Japan is you can find good of anything Japanese everywhere, because it's Japan.
I'm happy there are craftsmen who take pride in their craft and their output, be they Japanese teapot makers, calligraphy brush makers or soy sauce producers. And if you get a chance to try such things and appreciate their craft, great. But chasing it always seems so empty.
[1]: https://www.thecut.com/article/nyc-west-village-neighborhood...
"typically white" - the artists and gay men living in the area 60-30 years ago were "typically white" too. Same with the wealthy middle aged people who moved in 30 years ago and are being replaced with this new, young, temporary crowd.
> There is a long history of a certain kind of (typically white) people who are devoid of "culture" and move to a place and make it worse by not respecting that culture, like moving above a Mexican restaurant or a bar that's been there for 40 years and geting it shut down for noise. That sort of thing.
That Mexican restaurant you're imagining probably replaced an Italian grocery or a Jewish deli, or something else. The demographics change, and that's how the city works.
The "culture" of the West Village has been wealth and high end retail for 30 years. What happened recently is it got younger, even more homogeneous, and to your point, influencer focused. And I agree that THAT is insidious. Life is not a checklist of the top restaurants and bars, as selected by 23 year old women.
WV at least had some unique shops as recently as 10-15 years ago. It then went through its period of high end blight and finally the end state of most VHCOL urban retail.. the same 50 fancy brand stores owned by the same 10 conglomerates that you see in every rich hood globally.
It's all so boring.
I'd argue that gay men and artists are more likely to be atypically white.
This is entirely a result of where you hang out.
I'm a huge proponent of "good enough" in all aspects of my life so I fully agree. A two-year old used flagship phone is good enough. A cheap Thinkpad is good enough. Most clothes actually actually last a long time, even the cheap ones.
Anything above "pretty good at a reasonable price" has diminishing returns, and it attracts many of the people for whom vanity is the main source of enjoyment.
I can't speak to this particular NYC subculture, but it is definitely the case that all round the world long lines form around "the best" version of a thing even when it is literally the same thing you can get at a half dozen vendors on the same block. Some of the people in line may be tourists, but there are also plenty of local people who just enjoy the hustle and bustle. There are people who really do find pleasure in being part of something popular, doesn't even matter the intrinsic quality, what matters is the hype. If they chase that experience, who cares? It doesn't affect your life. Even if they overrun your daily haunt, just go to the next one down the street, since it didn't matter anyway. It seems to me there are much worse things to worry about than people who get a thrill out of waiting in line.
> But every time I see people who obsess over "the best" it always strikes me as so sad, like these chasers just have to have the external validation of being "in the club".
In my opinion, I think that looking for "the best" is perfectly fine for things you care about or use frequently.
It's when people try to find "the best" for everything that it becomes unhealthy.
Yes, I'm at the point in my life where for 99% of food.. waiting 1 hour in a line completely ruins any potential "best-ness" of said food item.
There's so many great examples of so many foods. There is no objective best. Even if there are consensus bests.. it doesn't mean my tastes align with consensus. Consensus is just an average of the crowd. Look at ice cream.. vanilla is generally the top ranked flavor in various lists. Likely it's that most people have a handful of favorite flavors, and vanilla is in everyone's rotation. Not that it is everyones number one.
And again, in a city like NYC where theres dozens of pizza shops on various "top 10" lists, waiting in hours in a line for the latest/greatest fad slice shows a lack of productive hobbies.
I live in walking distance of a variety of shops listed on these lists, but I order from the one that delivers. It's just pizza, it's not worth 2 hours of my life even if it were free, which it is not.
Many take pleasure in excellence, in whatever form. "The best" is in reality pretty ambiguous and subject to short term trends that will get you long lines and that trend chasing can be hollow, but I'm sorry I really strongly disagree about the difference between "good" and "excellent" in many things I've found.
I hear you. Part of my comment was about appreciating excellencce or a craft. But there's a difference between the ego and burning need for external validation for having partaken in something, gone somewhere, gotten into something or whatever vs appreciating someone's dedication and product.
Consider the people who go to Santorini to take the exact same photo, the vanity climbs of Mount Everest or going to some three Michelin star restaurant where your primary concern is posting about it on IG.
It all just seems so... desperate. Like hollow people trying to fill thsemvels with something, anything, so they can feel something and that something is simply the envy of other equally hollow people.
I might even call these "experience vampires". There's a difference between that and appreciation.
Take this soy sauce maker, the people I'm talking about will buy a bottle of soy sauce and then post all about it on social media. Others might talk to the master crafter about their history, how they got started, what they think goes into a good soy sauce, etc. Do you see what I mean?
I'm not normally one for stoicism. I tend to find people who crow about Marcus Aurelius tend to be at the entry for the alt-right pipeline more often than not. But in this case, I seem to find myself siding with the stoics.
>burning need for external validation
Eh, being an "influencer" is kinda dumb, but your estimations of the motivation of people who post a lot on social media might be exaggerated.
The best sushi restaurant in town doesn't have any more or less quality because people make a lot of instagram posts about it.
Annoying people liking a thing doesn't ruin it. Just don't pay attention to them and don't worry about what they're doing.
If you don't like how people are spending their lives give them less head space, don't spend too much time judging them, classifying them, or trying to fix the social ills causing their existence.
I will never understand how people have the guts to racially profile white people and at the same time call someone a racist for doing that with non white people. its just intellectually dishonest…but maybe I am not american..
you would need to eat soy sauce a lot of times to be able to say when its good vs bad. it has a lot of complexity like wine. and its craft has a lot of similarities too. I highly doubt this woman would rank in the best soysauce of this world. the way she does it seems pretty much like korean homemade from a few decades ago which is amazing still but the craft of soy sauce goes much deeper with lot of wine-like technology too. https://youtu.be/MKbRu3_Ynpk?si=PPRJMohg9AUWnTyv this one would be an accurate depiction of what I mean
"Whiteness" isn't a race. It's a social construct invented to justify slavery. It's a subjective reflection of who holds power and who is in the in group. The definition of who is white and who isn't has been subjective and has changed over time. Thomas Jefferson, for example, didn't consider Germans or Italians "white" (he called Germans "swarthy"). Congress passed a law over 100 years ago to declare Arabs "white". The Irish are now considered "white" where they once were not.
Also, I'm completely fine about making certain statements notihng race. For example: the victims of police violence are predominantly, or at least disproportionately, black.
In the case of NYC in general, and the West Village in particular, the long-term residents skew to minorities and those that displace them are typically white, like 23 year olds that somehow afford an $8,000/month WV apartment, which itself is an artifact of generational wealth built on racial discrimination.
we both now you not completely fine about it. the stat you shared just exemplify that. you likely would mute someone using your playbook to share crime rate per capita. and whiteness being a construct to justify slavery when arab world slavery far outpaced it and still exist today is another example of dishonesty.
Honestly the difference between best and good is purely subjective and mostly a function of hype. With a lot of things best and good can’t be told apart in a blind taste test.
"Ki Soon-do’s soy sauce has been served to Donald Trump "
lol, not someone I associate with refined tastes.
For over a decade I used Yamasa exclusively. It's pretty typical soy sauce, but it's 1) brewed in Japan, 2) has no preservatives other than alcohol.
I know there are superior versions, but one should never be sorely disappointed with Yamasa.
In this new economy, I've adjusted my standards so that I still have something to put the soy sauce on, and have been giving Marca Pina (Philippines) a go. Not bad, but contains preservatives.
I've never had true artisan soy sauce and suspect I never will. But used skillfully, amazing work can be done with Yamasa.
Treacherous Joe's, a decade or so ago, had a pure Japanese soy sauce, but at some point cheapened it with vinegar, albeit a negligible amount.
Open to suggestions that don't require being involved in the black budget.
Food isn't just about taste... it's memory, tradition, and identity all wrapped up in something you can smell and hold. What Ki Soon-do's doing isn't just making soy sauce, it's carrying centuries of Korean culture in every jar. It's the kind of craft that comes from generations of hands, instincts, and care, and not something you can automate or rush.
ChatGPT, is that you?
Yeah, I had the same uncanny valley feeling when I read this phrase: "carrying centuries of Korean culture in every jar". What next: Recommended that we "delve" into the history of soy sauce production?