Difference between Soy sauces..

I’d love to know too.. does anyone know? If I don’t have Japanese soy sauce, should I use Chinese or Korean one to substitute?

Please, Maangchi or anyone correct me if I’m wrong. I know a lot of this is just from my family’s personal use and preferences.

In my household there are these types of soy sauces:

jo seon gan jang = the korean soy sauce

this is our soy sauce. the korean soy sauce. this soy sauce is really salty, super earthy, very pungent. its a direct biproduct of making doenjang (korean miso).

‘normal’ ganjang = kikkoman soy sauce (japanese soy sauce)

my parents are from a batch of korean’s that immigrated here in the late 70’s and early 80’s. back in the day there wasn’t a lot of Korean products that they could get without having to make it themselves. So, I think for many Koreans who immigrated at that time this became their ‘normal soy sauce’ . My parents and all my parents’ korean friends used this soy sauce. i think it was the most similar thing that they could find from their mainland without having to make too much sacrifice in flavor.

jin gan jang = has a lot of flavor, its a premade variety

i honestly don’t know too much about this soy sauce other than its not just ‘salty’. it has a lot of other flavors in there that dont’ make it your typical soy sauce. My family doesn’t use this soy sauce all that much but typically it is used in banchans (not main dishes or soups)

gook gan jang = soup soy sauce.

this is the soy sauce for soups. it gives soups that salty taste without compromising the broth to a darker hue.

There is a very informative article on Crazykoreancooking.com on Korean soy sauce:
http://crazykoreancooking.com/foodandculture/korean-soy-sauce-ganjang

And another one on seriouseats.com on the difference between Chinese and Japanese soy sauces:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/do-you-know-your-soy-sauces-japanese-chinese-indonesian-differences.html

Both are pretty informative.

The original Soy sauce probably was made of meat and soy beans supplanted it.

I can answer this since I researched it quite a bit… the major differences are: In the Southern China, Light soy sauce is made using fermented beans dried in the sun and air, whose byproduct (after the soy sauce is done) is most likely Douchi.

This takes about a year and a half to make and the beans are fermented separately, then put into brine, which may have other things, but not always. It was traditionally made without wheat. I’m guessing this is the original soy sauce due to how the other versions are more purposeful–as if someone knew this would be the byproduct.

The Northern Chinese Soy sauce uses beans dried in a similar process and then brewed together to make it quicker. This is a quicker process, but I’m guessing much later. They kinda make a mash of it and force it into liquid state, but the byproduct isn’t eaten at all. This is DARK soy sauce, BTW. It’s forced through a quicker process…

Korean Soy sauce in the light soy sauce variety is a ground, block, super moldy-made soy sauce. You grind the beans, make it moldy as possibly, harbor the right sort of mold and bacteria taken from rice straw and then put it into a brine usually with garlic, jujubes and sometimes ginger or thick kelp.

Koreans require wheat in the soy sauce, unlike the other two soy sauces as a binding agent for the blocks. I’m theorizing that the use of wheat back in china might have flowed from Korea and was added much later as a flavor agent.

The byproduct, doenjang, is eaten. It is interesting to note that traditional Korean fermenting emphasizes air and sun as the hidden ingredients of making anything.

Japanese soy sauce is made making a paste, same as Korean version, and then sometimes adding an additional mold (Koji) plus the wheat flour (high gluten content) becomes optional. This is because the paste is fermented in the dark. The byproduct would be miso. It has a milder flavor because of this and this is why Japanese can make things like Tamari which uses barley flour instead of wheat, which is lower in gluten. It’s pretty much fermented from the paste stage forward away from light and air, unlike all the other versions.

Beyond that the crock pots, etc also influence it, but that’s probably more detail than needed.

Ive bought quite a bit of tamari and none of it had wheat or barley listed as ingredients. Just water, soy beans, salt and koji. Kikkomans gluten free soy sauce tastes very similar and its easy to find. Its just soybeans and rice also.

LKK Double Fermented soy sauce though is really really tasty. It does contain wheat but the flavor is excellent.