Its been a while since I posted about Soy Sauce. I'm on to a new batch which is pretty much the same as the last batch with one key change - I've used a natural salt in place of the industrial sea salt I used in my first few batches. I'm using a mined salt from Utah (once a sea bed). It is high in the "other" salts ie not NaCl, and has a nice reddish hue from the clay content. I've learned that there are often additional chemicals added to industrial salts that can mess up the fermentation process.
Right now it has a good, but strangely sweet smell to it ~ 2 months in. It should be ready for tasting by early summer.
I'm also making 2 other fermented products - a shrimp paste and whole fermented soybeans. The whole beans were boiled and added to a brine of 16% salt, 8% sugar mix and will sit as long as they last - they're pretty good after a week but not really fermented yet. The shrimp paste was based on blended bay shrimp mixed a lot of salt (I was kind of lazy and didn't measure). I mixed in a few slices of ginger and it has been sitting also for about 2months on my shelf at room temp. It smells a lot like a tide pool, and just like fish sauce, the fishiness disappears when you cook it. I used it to make dry fried green beans last week and it worked wonderfully.
Next fermentation post I'll talk about the fermented braising greens we use a lot in the winter - another chinese ingredient that seems crazy but tastes delicious! I also finished a batch of Sake that is out of sight.
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