Chapter 368 Soy Sauce
I have a lot of bean curd sheets, dried tofu, and bean skin in my home, but I can’t drink soy milk every day, and I still have so much goat milk to drink.
Zhao Yeqing had always wanted to make soy sauce, but he had no experience. He saw that the soy sauce at home had been eaten up long ago, and the remaining soy sauce had expired and could no longer be eaten.
Nowadays, the only ingredients used for seasoning dishes are shrimp powder, sugar, salt, vinegar and other non-perishable ingredients.
The sugar was homemade, and there was plenty of vinegar and salt. Meishan's house still had stock from the small truck that had not been taken out. The truck was used to deliver goods to the village stores, and they were all full of boxes.
The salt collected from the tourist area has filled up the corners of the original owner's house. There are twenty bags in each box, and each bag weighs one kilogram. There are more than ten boxes in total.
Enough food for two people for a lifetime.
White vinegar is packaged in bags, and there are several boxes of it. However, this stuff is not like salt. It is consumed quickly and it will probably be finished in a few years.
Mu Xi took the bag of soybeans to the yard, spread a plastic sheet on the ground, and then poured the soybeans on it to dry.
"It's okay if we don't have experience. At most, we can just do a few more experiments. What we have the most right now is time. Judging from the current weather, it doesn't look like it will get colder. We can plant more soybeans when we run out."
If the temperature here is really the same as that in the tropical rainforest, then there will be no obvious distinction between winter and summer, and the lowest temperature will not be below ten degrees. This is still a conservative estimate. When everything was normal before, the temperature in the tropical rainforest generally fluctuated between 20 and 30 degrees.
The highest temperature this year is around 38 degrees Celsius, so it can be inferred that the lowest temperature this winter will not be lower than 10 degrees Celsius.
You can just plant the used soybeans directly without worrying about them being gone.
Zhao Yeqing thought, that’s true. If he didn’t try it now, he would have to try it later. He couldn’t just use salt to cook for the rest of his life.
In the past, I only knew that soy sauce was needed to make soy sauce. This kind of soy sauce is not the soy sauce for making sauce-flavored liquor, but soy sauce essence, which is made by directly fermenting soybeans. In order to ensure the success rate of fermentation, some wheat flour is coated on it.
This was Zhao Yeqing’s first time doing this and he planned to try making one of each.
The first step is to soak the soybeans, which usually takes more than eight hours, until the surface of the soybeans is wrinkled.
While soaking the soybeans, the two of them cleaned the drying room they had built earlier.
This cabin has basically not been used since the last autumn harvest, when the rice, wheat and corn were dried. There is a stuffy smell inside after not entering for so long.
The water vapor inside was ventilated again to dry it out, and the mugwort was burned to kill bacteria, insects and dehumidify. After everything was ready, the soaked and drained soybeans were put into the steamer and steamed until cooked, and then brought in for fermentation.
After the steamed soybeans have cooled, they are spread flat on a winnowing basket. If the temperature in the room is not high enough, charcoal fire must be lit to ensure the appropriate temperature.
The fermentation temperature must be kept at around 37 degrees. The two did not know this data at the beginning, and it was only after two failures that they summed up the experience.
Failure at this step is not a big deal, as you only need to soak and steam the soybeans again. Failure during brewing will be troublesome, as the brewing process in the third step alone will take nearly four months.
The older generation can basically do everything. In the past, some elderly people in the village would make soy sauce at home and sell it at the market. However, it was not liquid soy sauce like this, but a solid paste. You only need to scoop a small spoonful each time you use it. It feels like soft lard and is very silky.
They don't know how to make that kind of thing, as they are just other people's secret recipes. Most people can only make liquid soy sauce, but they only know the theory and have zero practical experience.
I originally thought that the soybeans were very rich, but almost one-third of them were wasted in the first step of fermentation before I finally got the hang of it.
Each fermentation takes five to six days. If it fails, you have to start over from soaking the soybeans. However, not every failure takes five to six days. Sometimes the yellow tofu can be seen to be spoiled in two days.
If it successfully survives three days, you need to turn it over and stir it once so that it can ferment more evenly.
The fermentation is successful if there is yellow-green Aspergillus on the surface of the soybeans. Pour them into a bucket and add clean water in proportion and stir. As soon as the beans covered with yellow-green Aspergillus are poured into the bucket, the yellow-green powder floats in the air. The two of them hurriedly hold their breath to avoid inhaling it into their lungs.
After waiting for the soybeans to reabsorb water, pour them into a breathable bamboo basket, cover them with cotton gauze, and place them in a drying room to continue fermenting.
This step will take about eight to ten hours to complete. The soybeans are warm inside due to fermentation, and you can smell a faint aroma of soy sauce.
Although making soy sauce is time-consuming, there are actually very few steps that require manual operation, and it is basically left to time to complete.
After the two of them take time to check it every day, they can continue to go out grazing with the dogs.
January 20, 3040.
It took more than half a month for the two to graduate from the fermentation step and successfully move on to the next step.
This step is the most critical brewing step, which may take as short as four months or as long as half a year. Even if it takes such a long time, it may not be successful. This is one of the reasons why Zhao Yeqing had always wanted to make soy sauce but had never done it before. It would be too painful if he failed.
The brewing vat must be large enough. The two of them could not find such a large vat at home. In the past, they used homemade pottery jars to hold water or other things, but those pottery jars were made of pure adobe, with mud inside and no smooth glaze, so they were not suitable for use as brewing barrels.
Mu Xi drove to the tourist area, found two brown, 50-centimeter-tall, pot-bellied porcelain jars, and put the two types of successfully fermented beans into the jars.
It is best to put a layer of soybeans and then a layer of salt, and then sprinkle some clean water until the last layer is salt. This can prevent the growth of bacteria in the jar.
The Mu Xi porcelain jar was placed in the yard. Zhao Yeqing put a lid on it, calculated how many months it would take to dry in the sun, and wrote May 20th as the date of opening in the notebook.
You also need to check and flip through the process, but whether it is successful or not will have to wait a few months.
Zhao Yeqing pressed the ballpoint pen, making a 'click-click' sound, stretched out in the rocking chair, looked at the to-do list on the notebook and said, "Don't mention it, this Soy Sauce birth date is quite romantic."
Mu Xi nodded, took the notebook and checked what other things he needed to do in the near future.
"Well... the wheat is almost ready to be harvested. I checked the rapeseed yesterday and it's almost dry. The drying room is now vacant. I'll start harvesting them tomorrow."
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