Jack and Bridget discuss the best soy sauces at the supermarket.
Buy our winning soy sauce:
ABOUT US: Located in Boston’s Seaport District in the historic Innovation and Design Building, America’s Test Kitchen features 15,000 square feet of kitchen space including multiple photography and video studios. It is the home of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and Cook’s Country magazine and is the workday destination for more than 60 test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.
If you like us, follow us:
31 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Kikkoman not so good for stir-fried
I think this REALLY oversimplifies soy sauce and ignores the huge differences between Japanese, Chinese, Thai & other country's soy sauce. They taste different on purpose and are intended to provide different flavor profiles.
Had no idea there were so many soy sauce experts lurking around the youtube comment section…
I use pearl river
I use Ohsawa Nama Shoyu organic in everything. It’s the best soya sauce in the American market so far.
Would be awesome to test Chinese brands !
Kikkoman is just standard mass Japanese (American) produced soy sauce. Kikkoman tastes different depending on where it’s produced. Kikkoman also makes light soy sauce not to be confused with lightly salted which is just watered down, and sweet soy sauce. Further there are “boutique” brands and techniques that are much better and costly. Then of course there are many different Chinese and Korean soy sauces. Soy sauces are a bit like wines all being different.
Kikkoman has been made in Wisconsin for as long as I can remember.
yamasa is king…
Pretty generous glasses…
Like wine, garlic, vinegar and bitters, some foods are rather assertive by themselves – they need other elements to bring out their hidden flavors – soy sauce needs to be traditionally brewed and aged, regardless of what it is made of (wheat vs no wheat) and used sparingly in order to utilize it's subtle characteristics – this taste test illustrates how complex flavors can be
Please do a taste testof hoisin sauce. There are so many brands out there and knowing which flavors should stand out is a mystery.
I think that rather than picking a winner, this video would have served much better telling people what to look for on the bottle. Shoyu should always have somewhere between four and six ingredients (almost always four, I've only seen a couple brands at an Asian food store that mixed up the grains), and always in this order: water, soybeans, wheat and/or rice and/or buckwheat, and salt. That's it. If you see any colors, any flavors, any acids/vinegars, or anything else, it's flatly not shoyu and it's not good — avoid it.
This video also does kind of an injustice to Tamari. Tamari is an older variety of Japanese soy sauce that is darker and richer and ONLY used in cooking — of course it tastes bad and way too salty in a taste test like this. It is substantially better than shoyu in marinades — you can use as much as 1/3 less tamari as shoyu and get more flavor and more complex flavor out of tamari in a marinade all while adding less water. It is excellent. The draw, however, is not that it's gluten-free, because it isn't necessarily gluten free (and as above, shoyu isn't necessarily NOT gluten-free, either). The way to find good tamari is very similar to finding good shoyu, however. The first three ingredients are going to be water, soybeans, and salt; however, the next ingredient CAN be wheat. Obviously not gluten-free! The fourth ingredient can also be sugar, which is generally going to be your gluten-free varieties of tamari. After that there might be some alcohol, vinegar, and/or lactic acid (tamari is a fermented product, afterall, so these basically represent trace fermentation by-products).
I hope ATK re-does this testing except they distinguish between different styles of soy sauce. Tamari and Shoyu could both be described as soy sauce, but that is definitely where the similarities end. The defining feature of Tamari is not that it's gluten-free, it's a darker, richer soy sauce intended to be used for cooking — never at the table. It's actually an excellent product for marinade. Shoyu is more of a middle-of-the-road all-purpose soy sauce, you can substitute shoyu into recipes that call for other kinds of soy sauces usually by just adding a little extra shoyu, but it's not so strong that it's not usable table-side. Shoyu is also not necessarily made with wheat, there are gluten-free varieties of shoyu made with either buckwheat or rice — the last of which is my favorite kind of shoyu. Also, these are just the Japanese varieties of soy sauce, there's also a lighter Korean soy sauce really geared towards tableside use (Korean food uses far less soy sauce than either Chinese or Japanese), a whole range of Chinese soy sauces, and also a number of other soy sauces from southeast Asia and southwest Pacific islands which all have their own subtle differences.
Really, I don't think ATK would do something like taste testing distilled white vinegar against apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, rice wine vinegar, etc., but they've done something just about as silly as that by taste-testing traditionally brewed shoyu against hydrolized soy sauces and tamari.
Tamari tastes better in my opinion!
I prefer la choy over kikoman kikoman is good for certain dishes but it's a little too sour for most imo, la choy gets out the way when making sauces and such
Kikkoman???? What a joke lmao
Not a lover of the Kikkoman, I find it too harsh, my preference is a Taiwanese brand," Kimlan", it has a softer "rounder" flavour. I always have two bottles, on hand, one light ( in colour not salt ) and one dark which has a thicker consistency and is mellower. I use the light sauce to cook with and add some dark sauce for colour or sweetness, the dark sauce also makes a very nice dipping sauce. Unfortunately Kimlan can only be found in Asian stores so when I shop my Asian store I always buy enough to get me through 6 months, usually, two light and one dark . It is available on Amazon but it's more expensive than buying from the store.
In Malaysia we use black soy sauce to mix with rice, chicken, fish, and also potato even we can make it to be sauce for Fried banana, fried sweet potato or fried cassava. And it taste very much great and delicious.
In Hawaii, we love Aloha Shoyu and Yamasa Soy Sauce. Kikkoman not so much!
Soy sauce is on my grocery list, and I'll be taking your recommendation. Thank you
Wheres Lee Kum kee??? Pearl River bride??? Smh
2.79 per bottle, huh? I live in Alaska. Kikoman cost way more than that!
Thank you for sharing! Best presentation video of Soy Sauce!
😊🤗😊🤗
I love Korean Sempio soy sauce, and Thai Healthy Boy Brand mushroom soy sauce the best
Couple of things. The expensive brand one is actually Shoyu. Which is Japanese Soy Sauce. Its thinner, milder, and that particular product is a dipping shoyu. Javanese shoyu addsjrice and barley usually to the fermenting process.
Kikkoman I agree is the best all around soy sauce, however I prefer the lower sodium version for a dipping sauce straight. If you are combining the soy with other ingredients use full on kikkoman.
Usually you add mirin to tamari to make it have a sweeter balance.
For soy sauce, zero-added soy sauce is the best, such as Haitian soy sauce's "0 gold standard", there are many different varieties of soy sauce, such as low-salt, high-salt, sugar, and other natural additives to cope with various cooking methods
Ou yea kikkoman is rly my favorite too 🙂 we love it in czech rep 🙂
Let's do a Chinese soy sauce test.
Advice for you round eyes:
If you go to an Asian grocery store, look for "whole bean" soy sauce (sometimes called luxurious, or fancy, or something similar).
How to spot the bad soy sauce: look at the list of ingredients.
Kikkoman just has salt, soybeans, wheat, water, and a couple of preservatives. When they chemically simulate or accelerate the fermentation process, there will be a long list of chemicals besides just a couple of preservatives. The FDA does not regulate the term "natural" or "naturally brewed," so the only way to know is to read the ingredients.
I wish they would bring in someone more knowledgeable. Soy sauce in Asia are used in so many things. Each type of soy sauce has its use. Dark, light, and sweet are the main ones.