Today I visited Daimon Jozo, a family-owned soy sauce brewery with over 100 year history in Nara.

Ingredients of soy sauce are: soybeans, wheat berries, salt and water.

Soybeans are steamed, mixed with roasted and crushed wheat berries and inoculated with koji spores. It takes 72 hours for koji mold to grow, then it is added to salt water and fermented in a wooden bucket for 2 years.

This is called moromi. Soy sauce is the liquid from moromi, press-filtered.

Daimon Jozo has also been participating the project to revive original hishio, from which soy sauce and miso were developed. They successfully launched a product called “Kodai (ancient) hishio” based on a recipe in old document in China.

In “Manyoshu”, a poem collection in 8th century when Nara was the capital of Japan, there is a poem about eating red snapper sashimi with hishio. I couldn’t believe they actually served sashimi for me to taste hishio. What a treat! Hishio tasted similar to soy sauce but more intense, concentrated umami.