Xu Zhixin felt that she had been having a smooth time these past few days. The workers she recruited, both men and women, were all honest and hardworking. With the supervision of the team leader's wife and the eldest son and daughter-in-law, everyone worked hard. No one was lazy, and no one caused trouble or played tricks.
The team leader was as helpful as ever. With his help, we got everything the factory needed and put it in the factory. We had the workers clean what needed to be cleaned and she also had people install what needed to be installed. Now the factory looks very decent and can start production.
Because the salt well had to be dug thirty meters deep, which would take many days, Xu Zhixin first led the workers to produce soy sauce and vinegar.
The production of soy sauce requires a large amount of soybeans. Fortunately, soybeans can still be bought at this time, and the Lu'an Brigade has soybeans. The brigade leader decided to sell 3,000 kilograms of soybeans to Xu Zhixin at one cent per kilogram, which is very cheap.
Although soybeans were not expensive at this time, generally selling for 1.2 or 1.3 cents per pound, Xu Zhixin had a ticket to buy them outside, and she wanted to buy a lot, thousands of pounds. People would definitely not sell to her, and would be suspicious, and might even report her to the police.
Anyone with a little common sense would wonder what a person would do with thousands of kilograms of soybeans. Although she is now the director of the Lu'an Brigade's soy sauce and salt factory, and can be said to have bought thousands of kilograms of soybeans for the production of soy sauce, she is not afraid of the police coming, but it will definitely cause trouble and she will have to cooperate with the investigation.
Why bother with the police to investigate if there is nothing wrong and bring trouble to yourself?
So she was really grateful to the captain for selling soybeans to her, which saved her a lot of trouble.
After the soybeans were transported to the factory, she asked the female workers to soak the soybeans until they were expanded and wrinkle-free, then rinsed them several times with clean water, dried them, and then put them in a steamer to steam them. After steaming for two hours, they took them out and waited for them to cool down on their own.
There is a very important step in making soy sauce, which is to inoculate koji. Xu Zhixin spent a lot of effort to get the koji. Fortunately, with the help of the team leader, she finally got the koji from a team.
After the soybeans have cooled down almost completely, it is time to start inoculating them with soy sauce koji. The inoculation method is very simple, just mix the koji and flour evenly, then mix them with the soybeans so that the soybeans are covered with flour.
The next step is fermentation, which is also simple. Put the mixed soybeans in a clean box, wrap it with cloth, and place it on an empty rack to ferment and make koji. However, the temperature must be controlled well, between 30 and 35 degrees.
After 12 hours, when the material turns white, turn the koji over and continue waiting. After a day and a night, when yellow-green mycelium grows on the surface of the soybeans, the koji making is completed and the work is not far from being accomplished.
The next step is brewing. The fermented soybeans are put into a jar with oil holes that has been processed at the bottom. At this point, the work is done because you only need to wait four months, remove the wooden plug of the oil hole, put on a net to filter it, and then flush the salt water into the barrel or jar every 5 days. Then what flows out of the oil hole is soy sauce.
Under Xu Zhixin's supervision, the entire process of making soy sauce went smoothly and without any problems. It only took four months for the soy sauce to be ready.
Although the soy sauce cannot be made immediately and has to wait for four months, which means it will take four months before the soy sauce can be sold and make a profit, which Xu Zhixin feels is a bit long, but there is no way but to wait.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take as long to make good vinegar as soy sauce, so we can sell the vinegar first to make a profit.
After making the soy sauce, Xu Zhixin led the workers to make vinegar. Vinegar can be made with a variety of raw materials, but Xu Zhixin saw that the Liu'an Brigade had sorghum, so she decided to use sorghum to make vinegar. She bought 3,000 kilograms of sorghum from the brigade leader, also at one cent per kilogram, and also bought some bran from the brigade leader.
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