i don't know how this happened. perhaps i can reconstruct my life up until this moment and look for clues.
my husband loves all foods asian (except those with shellfish in them, which make his body blow up), and over the years we have made many a stir fry and dumpling. our kids have grown up with daddy making sushi on occasion, and we even have those cute little dipping dishes they give you at sushi places. do you ever look at the soy sauce they have at chinese, japanese, or vietnamese, restaurants? it's almost always kikkoman. it's available in grocery stores, too, and that's what we normally have at home as well. soy sauce is made with wheat. my little sister has celiac disease, so she can't eat wheat without causing problems in her body. there are other brands that manage to make soy sauce without wheat, so we've bought another brand to have on hand in case she comes over to eat with us and we happen to be making something asian (this was far more likely and common a few years ago when we lived closer to each other, but we still have this other brand around). anyway, we have two brands of soy sauce in our pantry.
so. this weekend, it was our anniversary, and i thought it would be fun to make sushi and some pot stickers for dinner (it's also a way for me to actually not have to cook, because my husband makes the sushi and even gets our boys involved in the chopping). for some reason my sushi chef grabbed the non-kikkoman soy sauce to eat with our meal. and because it was sushi, and you actually dip each bite in the soy sauce, you can really taste it.
before this meal, i thought all soy sauce was the same, just different packaging. but let me tell you, it is not. this other soy sauce slaps you across the face!
now, in our house, we try to get our children to be responsible for their own dishes, and sometimes one or two of them neglect their dishes after dinner, so i leave them there until the next morning and make them clear their dinner dishes from the table before breakfast. anyway, the morning after this sushi meal, there were a couple of dipping dishes remaining on the table, with soy sauce still in them. and do you know what had happened overnight?
magic! there were salt crystals forming from this other brand of soy sauce! whaaat?
i think i might need to do some experimenting to see whether i'm being unfair to this other brand and too favorable towards kikkoman. like maybe i should leave a half a teaspoon of both brands out in a dipping dish overnight and just see whether salt crystals form in both or just one. but regardless of the salt-crystal-forming properties of either brand, i am confident when i say that a) i can taste a marked difference and b) i vastly prefer kikkoman.
so there you have it. i am officially a soy sauce snob.
also, i am waiting for kikkoman to contact me and maybe send me a check. ;)
