Chinese Sweet Soy Sauce (Fù Zhì Jiàng Yóu 复制酱油)
Caramelized and perfectly balanced with warm spices and aromatics loved across southern and central China, this sauce turns ordinary soy sauce into something extraordinary.
Servings: 1 jar
Ingredients
- 2 cups soy sauce 480 ml, regular all-purpose soy sauce
- ¾ cup brown sugar 150 g
- ½ cup rock sugar 90 g, or granulated sugar
- 1 thumb ginger roughly chopped
- 6 scallions
- 3 bay leaves
- 1 star anise
- 1 cinnamon stick
- ½ tsp fennel seeds
- 2 cloves
- 1 cardamom pod
- 2 pinches aniseed
Instructions
- Pour the soy sauce into a small saucepan and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat.
- Add all the remaining ingredients. Stir constantly until the sugar has completely dissolved and the liquid starts to bubble.
- Reduce the heat and keep simmering. The sauce should gradually thicken and reduce to about two-thirds of its original volume. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to over an hour, depending on your heat and pan, so check it every 15 minutes. When it's thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, take it off the heat.
- Set a fine-mesh strainer over a glass jar or container and strain the sauce.
- Let the sauce cool completely before using. Stored in a sealed jar in the fridge, it keeps for up to a year.
Notes
Use regular all-purpose soy sauce. Chinese light soy sauce is saltier and thinner, so the reduced sauce can end up too salty.
The sauce thickens further as it cools – don't reduce it until it's syrupy in the pan.