The Dirty Secret Of Artificial Soy Sauce
Soy sauce, a pillar of Asian cuisine, may just be the world’s oldest produced condiment, dating back at least 2,500 years. The original Chinese method of production involves fermenting a mixture of soybeans, salt and wheat with a fungus from the Aspergillus family, either Aspergillus oryzae or Aspergillus soyae. These fungi produce enzymes that break down the proteins, fats and carbohydrates in soybeans into simpler, flavourful compounds. Some of these are amino acids, including glutamic acid, with a distinct taste, which goes under its Japanese name umami.
The Fungus enzymes do not break all the soy proteins down to individual amino acids. Some of the products are peptides, or small chains of amino acids that make a subtle contribution to taste. Salt-tolerant yeasts and lactic acid–producing bacteria are subsequently added to the fermenting mixture to bring out even more flavour. As an added bonus, fermentation produces a number of antioxidants. Indeed, real soy sauce is far richer in antioxidants than red wine.
The downside for producers and the reasons for its price is the fact that It takes months to produce traditional soy sauce. A cheaper, “artificial” version (with serious health consequences) can be produced in a day simply by adding hydrochloric acid to a defatted mash of soybeans, then neutralizing the acid with sodium carbonate. But this is a brutal method to break proteins down into individual amino acids with a flavour and aroma being quite different. Undesirable chemical compounds such as dimethyl sulphide and formic acid are also produced. The missing brown colour of fermentation products is simply solved by addition of caramel colouring. Sometimes, the artificial sauce is blended with some fermented sauce to produce a more acceptable product.
However, there is a bigger issue with the “chemical” soy sauce than just the muddled flavour. Hydrochloric acid hydrolyzes some residual fat in the soybeans into fatty acids and glycerol. The glycerol in turn reacts with the acid, and here is the glitch. These chloropropanols are suspected of having anti-fertility effects, of being carcinogens, and furthermore, 1,3-DCP is suspected of causing genetic damage that can be passed onto offspring. Some soy sauces produced by the acid method have been found to contain thousands of times more chloropropanols than is permitted.
This is why fermented soy sauces are higher in price and should be the only once you are using.
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