The Best Kind Of Soy Sauce For Every Job, And The Differences Between Them

Regular, light, tamari, ponzu, thick, dark, black, double black... Here's what you need to know.

Forget salt and pepper. As the product of two generations of Chinese restaurant chefs — not to mention a literal thousand years of Hokkien Han Chinese ancestry — soy sauce was the fundamental seasoning basis of nearly everything I ate after I had graduated from Gerber baby products. At the restaurant, we had various types, but they were such commonplace staples that I gave them little thought. That is, until I moved away and had to figure out how to make Chinese food on my own.

Armed only with your everyday Kikkoman “regular” soy sauce, whose logo I recognized from the buckets at my parents’ restaurant and the iconic double-spouted bottle, I tried my hand at stir-fry, fried rice and wonton meat. Everything tasted weak, watered down and weird. I called my dad, who told me all I needed was soy sauce. But what was lost in translation is that there are a bajillion types of soy sauce, and each of them does different things and has different flavor nuances.